Manliness, Cat Ladies, Fertility Panic and the 2024 Election

[Music] from New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein [Music] show presidential elections are too vast and complicated to be about any one thing but there are sometimes more about one thing than they are about other things the 2016 election was more about immigration about who counted as an American the 2020 election was more about Donald Trump about what kind of country America was and would become and the 2024 election is more about gender and family now normally when people say an election is about gender and family they're saying it's about women men in politics men in power that's the background that's considered normal it is when something challenges at or begins to change or a new set of issues and questions come to the four that they're noticed and they become something we fight over but that is not what I'm saying is happening in the 20124 election it's visions of masculinity that are unstable and contested in this race in Donald Trump and in Tim Walls you have two very different but very explicit archetypes visions of what it means to be a man Trump's pitch is built on I would call it an almost cartoonish over performance of masculinity which is aimed at alienated young men I mean having Hulk Hogan and the head of the UFC on your night at the convention really puts a sharp point on that but in Tim Walls Democrats have found their own version of a male archetype a football coach a soldier a guy who will fix your car but also Al an ally a man comfortable being in the role of supporting women a man unthreatened by social change a man even excited by it and then there's family dos of course put abortion at the center of the election gave the election huge stakes in terms of Reproductive Rights but the other side of that fight this year it's not what you might have expected if you've been following the politics of this for decades it's not the pro-choice movement versus the pro-life movement it's something newer and stranger a panic about falling fertility that doesn't just want to ban abortion though it does want to do that it wants to shame anyone who doesn't have kids it wants to undermine their legitimacy as full participants in political and I would even say cultural and civilizational life what does it mean to be pro- family is it to support people in finding the life path they want to walk whether that's becoming a parent or not that's more or less what KLA Harris believes or is it to use policy and culture to push people to have children to reward them for having more children to demean and even punish them for choosing to not have children it's more or less what JD Vance and the people who have influenced him Bel so to understand this election you need to swim in some ideological currents that most people don't really know are out there but there are people who spend a lot of time in those Waters Christine emba is a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of rethinking sex a provocation Zack beum is a senior correspondent at Fox who focuses on politics in the US and abroad he just published a book called The reactionary Spirit how America's most Insidious political tradition swept the world and they are the perfect guides on this as always my email as reclin show nytimes.com [Music] chrisye emba Zack beum welcome to the show hey Ezra it's good to be back thanks for having me so I want to start by playing a clip from JD Vance's 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson that interview is now very famous it's one where he talks about cat ladies I think that's what most people have heard from it but I want to play you a different piece of it and it's just a basic fact you look at kamla Harris Pete Budaj AOC the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children and how does it make any sense that we've turned turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it I just wanted to ask I want to zoom in on that last idea people who don't really have a direct stake in it Christine if you know the ideological world that JD Vance has become part of what do you hear in that what is the clearest version of the argument he's making I mean yes there are a couple of things going on in the statement first I think is the idea that the family should be in some way is the center of government that families are the most important part of the nation that if you are not part of a family or embedded in this familial web that you are therefore less committed to the country I think that we're also seeing JD vances suggesting that also having children is kind of the purpose of citizens a pronatalist policy basically that families with children are therefore furthering the nation or making America better and that families without children or people without children those aforementioned childless cat ladies are holding America back one of the things I wonder on this Christine is there are certain kinds of ideological statements that I've heard before and I always wonder if the people who are saying them fully believe them like if I sat down with JD Vance and I said do you believe that nuns don't have a stake in the future of civilization or that your colleague Senator Tim Scott doesn't have a stake in the future of the country that like an 18-year-old kid who goes to war doesn't have a stake in the future this is a thing I had heard people say before Vance I've heard it on the right for years but is it a thing people actually believe or is it a signifier like what level do you take it so I think that it's a little bit of both first of all when you talk about you know nuns specifically you can think about JD Vin's ideological commitments you know he converted to Catholicism in 2019 and ident as part of the post liberal almost integralist new right and within the Catholic faith obviously childlessness is a positive State you're able to be more committed to God and to higher things and JD Vance and also his wife in interviews have you know rushed to say that no they aren't talking about all childless people like they aren't talking about people who have had fertility issues or nuns or young men going off to war they may not have said that last one specifically they're talking about the intentionally childless so in some sense you could say that Vance doesn't necessarily believe the extreme version of what he's saying that all childless people are in a sense useless to America I think if you also look at the ideological background that he comes from whether it's post liberals or the Catholic integralists or even just the new right generally there's been an increasing open dislike of those in non family or non-traditional family situations whether it's gay people JD Vance has spoken about how he would have voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act and against lgbtq rights whether it's in their terminology when they talk about single women and childless women there are right-wing influencers who JD Vance has unfortunately very visibly spoken with who have come up with the term awful for affluent white female liberal their conversations about sort of the long house a place where women rule and men don't have a role in moving the family forward so yeah I think he both believes in this but in a slightly different way than his most extreme statements would make it seem Zach I want to key in on those ideological currents that Christine just mentioned Vance has bragged about being quote plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures you my friend are plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures that is true that is true where's he coming from so a few seconds ago Christine mentioned something about post- liberalism and I think that's a very important term here it's also a Loosely defined one and that uh comes from people like law professor Adrian vermule and Patrick Denine who is a political theorist in Notre Dame and they basically take an argument or or or vision of the world that challenges liberalism's emphasis on the individual instead of saying the state is meant to be an engine for individual self fulfillment or to allow people to live life as best they want it they argue that there's there's a shared Tils a purpose a common good to politics and this is religiously defined right for them it's primarily defined by Catholic Doctrine and the purpose of politics should be moving us towards that goal and part of that envisions the nation almost as an organic hole rather than a series of discreet individuals making choices so it's the question of what is good for the body politic as a unit and that includes perpetuity survival children hence the the natalism that's so important in Vance's thought but this is not the only strain it's just part of a world where many people sort of cross-pollinate one of them is the the online manosphere right a bunch of men who have become extremely resentful about the current state of gender Affairs that links back to the stuff about the long house that Christine was just talking about but that also cross pollinates a little bit with the tech right which has its own versions of right-wing ideology but shares a sort of contempt for democracy and liberalism with these other strains perhaps an even more vowed contempt for democracy in the likes of Peter teal and uh Curtis yarvin also known as menus moldbug both of whom are influences on JD van sort of directly right like he worked in this Tech world and then there's the national conservatives who are sort of the more mainstream face of a lot of this stuff I heard van speak at their conference in 2019 and he made an argument the speech was called against libertarianism or something along those lines now I I think that the question conservatives confront at this key moment is this whom do we serve do we serve Pure unfettered commercial Freedom do we serve Commerce at the expense of the public good or do we serve something higher and are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things now my answer is simple I serve my child and it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters Vance made a series of arguments that back then weren't very popular but really pre-aged where he was going in terms of a criticism of a state that focused on individual rights and prerogatives I cannot defend Commerce when it's used to addict his toddler brain to screens and it will be used to addict his adolescent brain to pornography I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbors without any consequence because those people chose to take those drugs you've made this point about the differences between what you call sort of the neop patriarchy right and the bar stool conservatism right and the bartool conservatism right has been a little less excited about some of what it is hearing from van so can you walk through the difference there yeah uh these are crosscutting currents throughout all of those different groups that I described neop patriarchal right is the one that Vance has really aligned itself with is a group that says a major focus of the state should be on fostering traditional morality and family formation and that means you know they don't explicitly say women shouldn't be working most of the time though sometimes they do but it basically means an emphasize on traditional Loosely defined family structure so you got to have kids you got to get married shouldn't be having sex out of marriage birth control is probably bad I mean you can see some of this in the book by the head of the Heritage Foundation which JD Vance wrote forward to the Publications have been delayed but some of the excerpts have leaked and he makes exactly this kind of argument about birth control specifically and other family planning choices so that's one version of conservatism when it comes to views of the family but another one which honestly I think fits Donald Trump a little bit better is this bartool conservative it's a term that's named after barol Sports the popular sports website the term was coined by Matthew Walter who's a conservative columnist and Walter's argument is that these kinds of conservatives aren't social conservatives like he is they are people who really are are frustrated with the left's control of culture in the same way that the neop patriarchal writ is but for completely different reasons they're angry that they can't say sexist stuff in public they're angry that sexual harassment has become something whose prohibitions are strictly enforced and they think prevent you know flirting in the workplace or something like that they want to be able to see scantly clad women on television they like seeing cheerleaders at football halftime shows and these dudes I use that term very explicitly because it's like you know it really speaks to the self-identity right these dudes are very very different from the people who are telling you to like you know don't have sex before marriage have a family as soon as you can and while those distinctions are papered over when they're fighting and at loger heads against the left in a kind of Alliance they really really disagree fundamentally on certain key issues and and one good way to see this tension come up is the way that Dave pornoy who founded barcol Sports got really angry after roie Wade was overturned he thought that this was the not the state's business to be interfering with abortion this tension it's almost embodied by the Republican ticket right because Donald Trump is nothing if not a bar conservative yeah I wanted to pick up on that Christine I want to play what Trump said about JD Vance's comments which in a way were a defense but in a way were a disavow well first of all he's got tremendous support and he really does among a certain group of people people that like families I mean you know he made a statement having to do with families that doesn't mean that people that aren't a member of a big and beautiful family with 400 children around and everything else it doesn't mean that a person doesn't have he's not against anything but he he loves family it's very important to him he grew up what you hear in that Christine well I mean it was very clear that Donald Trump was really reaching to make JD Vance's statement sound a little bit less extreme he's not against anything yeah he's he doesn't hate people who don't have 400 beautiful children no he he just likes families man Hees but I think it's really interesting what you heard him say in the first part of his statement almost like the first or second thing that he said was JD Vance is very popular among a certain group of people which is to say or rather not say not my group of people but some people really like JD Vance and we have to respect them you know the other thing that he was saying JD Vance isn't against families he loves families but he doesn't want to actually State the policies that JD Vance is in favor of because those are policies that actually could alienate voters and in fact already have alienated voters he isn't stating the things that JD Vance has said about how no fault divorce has become basically a Scourge on the country and that parents who are arguing should stay together for the sake of the kids even if there is perhaps violence in the relationship which is something he said in a speech in I think 2021 he isn't stating that you know JD Vance has voted against a bill that would protect IVF he isn't talking about JD Vance's statements about abortion JD Vance has said that he is against abortion and has previously been against exceptions even in the case of rape and incest he has only recently moderated his stance to provide for reasonable exceptions what he calls them after he was being considered for the Republican ticket because you know Donald Trump knows that that doesn't really fly with the major maity of Americans and those are seen as pretty extreme views outside of the small group of people who JD Vance really gets along with there's a way Christine that the imagined voter for Vance and for Trump seems very different to me so Vance I think is wanted to cleave politics around this idea of the family and and I think in his head you can sort of pit the families against the non-families Trump I think has not been doing that what what I've watched watch him doing has a lot more to do with masculinity his night the the final night of the Republican National Convention struck me his like gender performance it it was Camp masculinity I mean he had Hulk Hogan he's introduced by the head of the UFC Dana White axio reported that this was really a strategy Republicans believed young men are ready to leave the left that Trump is going to soak his campaign in testosterone and symbols of strength and and Republicans I think have had reason to believe that there is a wedge emerging between young men their politics and and the left why so you know there's always been kind of a marriage Gap in voting so since at least the 1990s married Americans have voted more consistently for Republican candidates than single Americans have and there's always been a gender gap in voting or at least something of a gender gap women tend to be slightly more liberal than men but this Gap really has opened up in the past 20 years especially around and past the 2016 election especially young women versus young men and I think the Republican party has identified this as a fruitful opening especially after the MEO movement after the 2016 election after all the things that happened in the late 2010s regarding gender I think it just became a more salient issue for both sexes women were awakened to the idea and Clarity of sex discrimination feeling that it wasn't something that had happened in the past the idea that Ro v Wade could be overturned and then was kind of cemented that Vision in women's minds and they have begun voting more on feminist principles men on the other hand and especially young men many of them I would say not all of them seem to have seen many of those movements as attacks on men and attacks on masculinity so men and especially young men are more likely to say that they are not feminist and that they have experienced discrimination due to their sex that Gap has grown significantly and Republicans are willing to exploit that isn't there something to that at least aesthetically that the left became in this period I wouldn't say hostile to men and their interests but maybe to masculinity you had all the futurist female shirts and I drink male tears mugs and talk of toxic masculinity was everywhere but that got picked up and and now you see if you're looking at at 2020 voter intentions and polling up till now although this may have changed you know in some of the the newer Harris polling but at least when Biden was running you had moved from young men being in support of Joe Biden in 2020 to being heavily for Donald Trump in 2024 you have the sort of wide online manosphere I mean there is a sense that the left became hostile to what you might call masculinity yeah Ezra so I think you're actually observing something really real and I would agree with you there I mean first of all we kind of have to think of the material conditions of the last couple of decades so we've seen a shift in the economy away from kind of traditional and perhaps masculine favoring manufacturing jobs and labor jobs jobs to social skills jobs that have tended to favor or at least allow women to enter the marketplace you know post the 1970s women who were previously kind of barred or kept out of schools and employment entered the workforce and entered the educational market and have really succeeded and in many cases are outpacing men right now you know we're seeing men only earn about 74 bachelor's degrees for every 100 that women earn wages for men especially workingclass men have basically stagnated since the 1970s or even declined wages for men everywhere except the very top of the economic ladder and so I think that men now in competition with women generally are feeling a little bit of anxiety perhaps more than a little bit I would say kind of anxiety and uncertainty about where they fit in America both in a social sense and in the economy so that stress was kind of already on the ground and underlying our political landscape and then you know women have as I just mentioned really succeeded and there has been a lot of discussion about how women are succeeding you mentioned the futurist female t-shirts Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 I'm with her sort of foregrounding the fact that it was a woman running now it was a woman's time to lead I think that that has felt a little bit exclusionary towards certain men or at least has been taken as exclusionary towards Ben and then especially around the me too moment in 2018 when the bad behavior the terrible behavior of certain men became really noticeable and women were felt compelled to speak out about their own experiences you know there wasn't just a push back against specific bad men although many speakers and pits tried to be more specific but there was a a general aura that you know masculinity was a bad thing and yeah a lot of men I think felt attacked they felt that women were not just succeeding but actually holding them back and discriminating against them in real life I think this was not necessarily the case I think that men and women clearly need each other to survive but the discourse especially the popular discourse on shows on TV on podcasts on the t-shirts that women were wearing around did seem I think offensive to a large group of men and made them resentful so Zach you mentioned a second ago the national conservatism conference at the the 2021 iteration of that Senator Josh Holly who's part of this Rising new right a sort of contemporary of JD Vance he gives a speech that I want to play a bit of for you here it was about quote the left's attempt to give us a world Beyond men their messages this nation needs to be taught how unjust it is to begin with and then complete completely remade from top to bottom that's the leftist project that's their grand ambition to deconstruct the United States of America this work of deconstruction is what unites today's left and draws together all of their various projects from critical race Theory to their economic socialism to their bizarre war on women's sports but what I want you to notice what I want to call out tonight is that the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men the left want to Define traditional masculinity as toxic they want to define the traditional masculine virtues things like courage and Independence and assertiveness as a danger to society this is an effort that the left has been at for years now and they have had alarming success so Zach what do you hear when you hear that and what role did that particular set of ideas that conservatism is a defense of of traditional masculinity and the traditional masculinity needs to be defended begin to play on the right so I hear something that I write about in in my new book The reactionary Spirit Well hear a little bit of the reactionary spirit in there what Holly is trying to speak to and you can see this in sort of the broad Arc of his work and and his conservative fellow Travelers work is it a belief that there's been a fundamental dislocation of gender relations and Americans sense of self and place and how they find themselves through their families and through gender relations defining a role and a pathway forward in life it is not explicitly stated as women belong in the home I mean Josh Holly's wife is as an attorney right who has argued before The Supreme Court I don't think that would be his position uh at least if it was it' be profoundly hypocritical but rather that certain Americans have been left behind not just by you know in economic terms but in Social terms in the sense that sexual Liberation was part of a series of changes that made the world illegible to a lot of people created a sense that everything was on your own you were making your own choices you were going wherever you wanted and that part of what was thrown out there was traditional masculinity a sense that boys and men knew the kind of person they wanted to grow into the kind of person they wanted to become what virtues there were for them that all of that being pushed away by the feminist revolution has been very harmful for men and boys you hear this from someone like Holly there's a certain version of it that comes from uh the term is reactionary feminists which is a sort of very small intellectual movement of feminists who argue that much of what happened in the 1960s ended up hurting women rather than helping them and so Hol is really trying to tap into that and turn this sense of male dislocation and social disorder into a weapon a political weapon against liberals and liberalism you sort of located the inciting change there is a sexual Revolution when I listen to Vance when I listen to people who influence him like Patrick Denine who who you mentioned earlier I hear it as more on one level philosophical liberalism almost entirely the sort of individual as opposed to the family change as opposed to tradition cities as opposed to sort of more rural more traditional ways of living and I also hear it in the much more modern and I think awkwardly grafted on critique of trade policy of immigration of manufacturing jobs being lost the sort of I think for for Vance and for some of these people the way the economics comes into play here is it we let these masculine jobs these traditional communities get hollowed out by China and then in the void left by them what we replace them with was as Christine put it these social skills jobs like listen to Richard Reeves now who has written I think a very good book on the problems men are facing and and he's saying you know we need to get more male nurses we need to get more male teachers we need to get more male child care workers and I think these guys would say no we need to go back that there's a certain kind of economy that works for men and because it works for men it works for families or at least these kinds of families and that we need that that is sort of my understanding of how it all fits together but you've studied this more deeply than I have so how would you amend that I think the point that you made about it being awkward is a good one right because it doesn't really make sense as a narrative why can't men be nurses really why there's no explanation here it's just sort of implied in the discourse that there's something bad about this something that has disadvantaged men right and it's never spelled out how these economic changes like specifically what about men makes them losing as a result of this or causes a loss and I think the the the glue that sticks it all together I mean there there's two versions of it right in in the popular one the glue is Nostalgia is a sense that there was a time where things were better for men and for everybody and that meant men going into the coal mines it meant men going into the factory it meant men doing manly things and that's just sort of symbolic of non-specified like there's no one year everyone's like yeah we should go back to that one but it's sort of like stylized an imaginary 1950s I would say in which things were more stable for a lot of Americans and that stability was produced by the existence of these male coded jobs actually Ezra I think that you're on to something that makes a lot of sense I think that the way that you're putting it together shows that it does hang together I think that at least the van swing of the Republican party and you know Holly in his statements other sort of younger Republicans like Marco Rubio as well their vision is rooted in maybe Nostalgia but also sort of a traditionalism and also I think a religious based sense that there is something different about what men do men are ideally providers they have different impulses of course they don't fit in an economy where they're asked to do that and I think Holly and Vance and this group of Republicans are hoping to sort of bring that gender essentialism back to the four and I think we've we've talked about post- liberalism a lot and we've mentioned the name Patrick Denine a lot and actually his first book that came out that was actually kind of a huge deal to the point that Barack Obama even recommended it in his books of the summer the year that it came out was literally called why liberalism failed and it was an argument against both economic and personal liberalism this idea that growth was the best thing and that people should be maximizing their individual choices and that that was the way forward he argued in fact that GDP and growth were not necessarily the most important thing that again this idea of human flourishing positive human lives in a human Community were more important and then Ezra I think you had Orin Cass on your podcast a couple weeks ago and he with his Think Tank American Compass which is actually a pretty new outgrowth talks pretty clearly about the economic shifts and what Republicans or conservatives you know the sort of new right the new conservative movement should priori TI in government and again we we think about the economic shifts of the 1970s and say well you know we exported more jobs opened up women were in the labor market we are trading with China the GDP has risen right the economy has grown and actually I think the sort of post- liberal view that Vance supports would suggest that you know the economy growing the GDP growing is not necessarily a good thing or it shouldn't be the highest goal the highest goal should be sort of family fulfillment flourishing of you know American citizens it allows them to make strong marriages to have children and so if it's you know a GDP growth that seems to be benefiting women at the expense of men or the economy is growing but men don't have the jobs that they used to have and are dying deaths of Despair instead of working that growth actually isn't that useful and so I think that's how you can synthesizes sort of protectionist and isolationist moves with this gender ideology yeah I do think the interview that I did with Orin Cass a few weeks few months it's been a very intense time period here is useful for this but also I had Patrick denan a year or two ago and it's very much about these and I think a very revealing conversation in this election where Republicans have sort of been turned into the weird ones maybe have become the weird ones the wedge I see some of them still trying to use is trans issues you can see that in in JD Vance trying to turn around the weird label in this online video the people who call me weird want to give like hormone therapies and sterilize 9-year-olds like I think it's a lot weirder you know me just like living a normal life with my kids and my wife but this is this is what they do I think is they latch onto a message and they try to sell it even if it's fake what do you think of that Christine you know one of the things that I think has been very unsettling to the men who are in many cases Now sort of core supporters of trump in the Maga movement is the idea of gender being flexible the idea of trans rights in America that there could be trans people in public or trans people in schools or even gasp using the bathroom is really unsettling to the secure vision of gender that the right had embraced and what JD Vance is trying to do in this clip is make the sort of unsettling nature of transness the unsettling nature of you know alternative sexual identities feel very Salient to voters as a way to suggest that yes the Democrats are doing something weird with gender that's unsettling that's coming for your kids and that Republicans are you know on the literal straight and narrow and will save you from that you know Republicans talk about themselves as the party of family JD van talks about being very pro- family I mean since 2016 qanon has been just obsessed with the idea of people preing on children to the point of totally insane conspiracy theories in that clip JD Vance talks about how the left wants to sterilize children they have tried to Brand Tim Walls as tampon Tim because he pushed public schools to put you know tampons and pads in the boys bathrooms as if this was somehow going to like hurt boys to see you know a box of pads in their bathroom talking constantly about not just drag queens or Pride parades but drag queen story hours for kids and pride parades that walk past children this idea that trans people are a threat to the young specifically and that the left or liberals somehow want to hurt children or make children change in a way that's unhealthy for them makes the idea seem much scarier both to those deep into conservative and other politics but also perhaps to the average voter who you know isn't that interested necessarily in trans sports or LGBT issues but yeah wants kids to be safe the other thing I want to add I think is that trans issues play a really important gluing role in the conservative coalition we've been talking a lot about the distinction between barol conservatives and sort of neop patriarchal conservatives one way that you get people who have such different views on on gender and social roles to align is by creating a shared enemy and and trans people are for different reasons disfavored by both groups the sort of traditional conservatives for the reasons that Christine was was just talking about and the bar stool types because they see trans people I mean partly it's just the old ick factor that you used to hear about during gay marriage conversations before that was an issue that was one by the left they just find it weird and kind of creepy but the second part of it is that trans people are seen as the tip of the liberal repressive sphere right the idea that people can't tell you to call a man a woman or a woman a man in their View and that you're if you do that all of a sudden you're dead naming someone whatever that means right like that kind of gut don't tell me how I see other people and how I should talk is a lot of what a bartool type is reacting against what makes them conservatives is a sense that liberalism and its ideas impose oppression on them by controlling the way that they can talk and think and so for These two factions they can both agree that liberals should not be allowed to be deciding what gender means or changing the way the bathrooms work or uh letting men into women's sports in their view the sports one is a really really big connective issue one that speaks to the Deep anxieties of both sides here so yeah trans trans women in sports in particular embodies the way in which one issue can unite the right on gender even as they disagree very fundamentally about uh the overarching question of gender roles this to me is one reason the question of trans participation in sports has has become like such a dominant Obsession on the right and like from my perspective you probably want to have a nuanced take on this because different sports are different and you know the questions we create in their categorization of competition is different like I get why people are unsettled over it but the bar stool conservatism world is so Sports oriented right I mean I almost have never heard J Rogan speak with as much Fury as he has in in terms of you know allowing trans women into various Combat Sports I mean the bar stool conservatives want to be left alone but they really want Sports left alone you've seen JD Vance trying to imply that a boxer at the Olympics is trans which he is not but but is trying to expand this conflict to the Olympics you really see it in in their efforts to make this a central issue in American politics it it's a perennial source of outrage where you can say this thing happened and it exemplifies the destruction of fairness and the way that Liberals are tearing apart the way that the world ought to operate being able to tap into this realm of fairness in sports is really important because it's a sense that there's something wrong that's why it's so focused on trans women not trans men as being the issue it's just going to be I think for a while like Ezra to your point there's there's a nuanced way to talk and think about this there is but because it's such good culture War red meat that Nuance perspective is just like not going to be out there in the world for quite some [Music] [Music] time Zach you mentioned your book and one thing you do there is sort of track the reactionary ideologies that we're seeing in America with their kind of ties to to other worldwide movements the the gender Dimension these sort of arguments about family these arguments about masculinity how much is this a thing that is happening specifically in the American context right now has to do with our culture and our movements and how much is this something we're seeing cross nationally yeah uh it's a great question because the cross-national picture is really complicated but I would say that the way that I Define the reactionary spirit in the book right is when a movement inside a democracy that supports a certain set of social hierarchies is seeing egalitarian change happen through Democratic means they're faced with a choice right and that choice is either accept that change might happen through Democratic means and try to sand off what they see as the uh sort of worst edges or else try to go outside of democracy and take authoritarian maybe even extra legal steps necessary to prevent democracy from leading to changes in social hierarchy so I think that's really important because the feminist Revolution is not just happened in the United States and the feminist Revolution which someone like Denine would argue is an outgrowth of liberalism he would say that's bad I think that's true and it's good but it's happened across the world right this is not just an American thing so people committed to traditional gender Norms everywhere are grappling with changes to family structure to women entering the work Force to the idea that certain things that they took for granted are sexist and the result of that becoming a major part of our social and political world is being felt again everywhere not just in the United States and has become a a very potent political fuel for reactionary political movements so in Hungary for example which I think is is one of the most Sterling examples of a democracy backsliding into authoritarianism powered by sort of reactionary sentiment gender politics are at the Forefront of the government's pitch to voters and it still needs even though it's an authoritarian State the way that it's set up still depends on getting votes like actual real votes and so a large portion of its message is saying we are the party of the traditional family defending it against whatever kind of enemy is coming in not just immigrants but leftists at home the European Union quote unquote gender ideology which is referring to the LGBT movement but all of this is centered around the idea of preserving the Hungarian nation and perhaps the example that people cite the most when they talk about a country where gender is becoming the center of politics of South Korea which is it's really true right the current president of South Korea won office on a pitch to disaffected men right and gender conflict has really become the maybe the cultural Battleground inside South Korea but that's not normal right it's not true in most countries the degree to which gender has become the dominant issue in different countries is is very very very very different and depends on a lot of specific local circumstances I'm glad you brought in South Korea here because South Korea has a specifically intense version of a problem that that we've talked about glancingly here but I think it's prettyy Central to the thinking on the right which is South Korea's fertility rate has become extremely low if I'm remembering this correctly I think it's 08 when you need about 2.1 2.2 for replacement so South Korea is a society that is something doesn't change and has been going on for a while and it has not been changing that is on the verge of really radical shrinkage which is already creating problems is going to create profound problems but you know America is also beneath replacement rate fertility and this has become I think almost Ain on the right to what climate change is on the left it is the problem that is the context for like all future problems the the problem that is actually existential I want to play a clip here from a Tucker Carlson interview with Elon Musk and and I think we just want to make sure that that you know uh we we have civilization go onward and upward um and uh that's for example why I'm concerned about decreasing birth rates and and um the fact that for example Japan had twice as many deaths last year as births so the you that that's and and they're they're a leading indicator it's this is can can I and and you've you've written and talked a lot about this but can I just ask you to pause just for a parenthetical note why is that I mean the urge to have sex and to procreate is after breathing and eating the most basic urge how has it been subverted well it's just the in the past we could rely upon um you know simple uh lmic system rewards in order to procreate um but once you have birth control um and you know uh abortions and whatnot now now you now you can still satisfy the limpic Instinct but not procreate um so we don't we haven't yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent you know last 50 years or so um for the poor birth control you know I'm I'm sort of worried that hey civilization you know don't if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers perhaps increase a little bit then civilization is going to crumble just this the old question of like uh will civilization end with a a bang or a whimper well it's currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers yes uh which is depressing as hell Christine tell me about the the role these fears are are are playing on the right and the sort of different ideas here they may be tied together so one of the things that is unspoken in this clip but seems very important is the idea that citizens have to create the citizens to replace them in whatever country they're in which sort of negates the idea that immigration could be a possible way to help expand a society or prop up a civilization this idea that you know immigration can't be used to replace the population that in fact immigration is a bad thing and we should be wor of it is you know a huge part of the Republican party's platform it's this idea of the great replacement theory is something that the right has mentioned often and that Tucker Carlson mainstreamed on his show that Democrats and Liberals are somehow going to bring in immigrants to replace American citizens who aren't having enough children to fill up America by themselves basically and that this is a bad thing so often when you see you know conservatives talking about a lack of family formation they're kind of talking about a specific kind of family that aligns with their ideals which is why even though there's a lot of talk about how Americans aren't having enough children how there aren't enough babies how were below replacement rate politicians like JD Vance have still voted against policies that would you know allow Americans do access IVF and fertility treatments there is kind of the right kind of family that's supposed to be reproducing and that's the family that they're worried about I want to add something which is that apocalypses and imagined or real tell you a lot about a political movement and one thing I think that's really interesting and we can talk specifically about the American context here is the shift in the sort of conservative vision of a future apocalypse from being the debt and the deficit which used to be really the centerpiece of conservative fears about the future and and that's declined in prominence in conservative movement rhetoric with a lot of the family formation stuff and uh declining bir bir rates becoming a much more central theme and not an economically framed one it's not the typical well uh if we don't have enough babies then we're not going to be able to pay for Social Security or for the welfare state anymore uh which is you know a big theme in a country like Japan when they talk about the nature of their birth rate crisis it's this existential kind of civilization stuff that you heard Elon Musk talking about that there's the death of a country when it doesn't have enough children that it dies and in some IL defined way it's not like you know a specific set of mechanisms kick off right and then the government literally crumbles it's that civilization in some broad sense dies without enough children and I think this speaks to the changing nature of the political right like when I talk about in the book right is that politics in general has moved away from having a material Foundation right where primarily divisions about class and questions of the distribution of wealth materially defined uh the division between left and right right and towards more cultural issues uh and gender is one of them a really really really important one that's more or less Salient in different countries based on again particular circumstances but the the trend towards postmaterial politics is true across the advanced Democratic world and at the same time they express these fears in kind of off-putting ways Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk systems yeah I don't know that that's what people are are thinking about when they're deciding whether or not to reproduce like what's my olymic system up to but you know one can say and I think that you know Vance has tried to better and worse AFF to kind of pull this out policy-wise um that there is something to be worried about when citizens when young people in a country feel like they can't have children or can't reproduce can't have a family again this idea of human flourishing what does it mean to live sort of a good life and a happy life suggest that you know if you're living a good and happy life you want to further it you want to bring more people into that life and the fact that Americans or Young Americans Carlson and musk worry feel unwilling to do that suggest that there is something wrong with the the American atmosphere the American Spirit the American Life today that's what they see as a civilizational decline in a civilizational end there's a reason I picked that Tucker Elon clip which is one that that Tucker and Elon are known to have been pushing Donald Trump to choose JD Vance right they see him as as one of their own but also that I think it makes some sense of where Vance and people like him have gone in this so if you take sort of the the argument Elon Musk makes which is that birth R decline is a civilizational crisis that it stems from birth control and abortions and quote whatnot making it possible to satisfy our desire to have sex with each other to to put it in a little less limic terms but then subverts the natural outcome of that and you put that together and you have a real problem right you you something that we have broken The evolutionary logic of humankind and different people have sort of different visions of this I think one reason you see a lot of these people converting to Catholicism is partially a view that religions and particularly more traditionalist ones like the form of Catholicism that a lot of these converts Embrace are a kind of fertility technology that religious societies have more children this is cultural you can't just solve this with policy but I think it also gets it why Vance speaks about people without children the way he does right that speaking about them as a kind of parasitic mass as something that is aberant as something that should be made socially uncomfortable to be right I mean all these people to my knowledge they understand that lots of societies have tried to use policy to change the fertility rate and nobody has been all that successful and I think their view is it you have to make not having children socially unacceptable like tax policy might help you there in in advanced version of it an expanded child tax credit though it's worth saying that he has not actually been a consistent or significant proponent of that or supporter of it uh he wasn't even there on the recent child tax credit vote but it's not strong enough and what you need to do is go back to the kind of thing that we used to have where I think probably religion but but maybe nationalism recasts you as outside the circle of productive citizen the circle of good person if you are not having children right like like I think within that framework it all kind of makes sense why you can't just speak about it as you know a choice we should support you have to speak about the other choice as something that has to be turned into a kind of Mark of social dishonor yeah post- liberalism takes as its founding premise right its most basic idea is that liberalism isn't just like a political system it's not you know individual rights it's not a constitution it's not even a sort of premise that individuals should be free to live life as they want it's a set of social norms it's a very specific set of ideas about what it means to live a good life and that liberalism is not neutral on the good in the way that a liberal like John rolls would say it is liberalism is pushing a liberal Lifestyle on everybody and you know today this gets cashed out in terms of you know liberal controls over the institutions right people in universities in the media in all sorts of other positions of power changing culture and ways that promote a liberal lifestyle and a liberal lifestyle in their vision is one of hedonistic self-pleasure it's one of just putting yourself above of everything else doing whatever you want however you feel like it and letting obligations to communities and organizations and all of that fall by the wayside and this idea right fits very nicely with what you're saying Ezra I think it's actually at the root of it because they see being childless as the epitome of this liberal self- valorization of saying I'm so important that the continuity of my Society doesn't matter to me right what I care about is doing whatever I feel like right now and my ties to these broader sets of Institutions to a church to a community to a neighborhood to a country are less important than I don't know being able to go to brunch on a weekend right that that that is their stylized vision of liberalism I don't think this is correct but it's at the heart of this particular critique and at the heart of the solution being not necessarily policy per se but policy in service of creating a new set of social ethoses one that is avowedly illiberal right and tells individuals there's a good way to live a life and the one that you need to be following the one the state should be promoting is marriage and children I'm curious where this ends up cashing out in in policy because I have found this whole movement of people in incredibly slippery here so I had Patrick Denine on the show The the sort of post- liberal Catholic thinker and we had this whole I would call it bizarre conversation and and I recommend people go listen to it or part of it was I just end up spending a long time asking like do you support repealing no fault divorce and he was like well no I mean maybe no and it was very clear to me in that that the things that logically followed from the arguments he was making he understood to be IAL poison and I think an interesting thing about Vance is that in his effort over the past couple of years to rise to the top of this group of people and become their Champion he's been willing to publicly bite bullets that even they wouldn't have bid in right like he has actually talked about why women should stay in violent marriages he has talked about giving people with kids more votes than people without kids he makes economic arguments I've looked at this guy's economic policies he is not proposing anything anything anything anything that is even remotely of a size that it might change fertility rates as far as I can tell that's a hard thing to do anyway but he's definitely not in that neighborhood he attacked at some point kamla Harris for not supporting a child tax credit actually kamla Harris was a leader in the Senate of expanding the child tax credit and then as vice president cast a tiebreaking vote to expand the child tax credit but also JD Vance does not himself have a very significant new child tax credit plan he has not offered anything that is beyond the boundaries of what we have seen in in American Life there was this coming book from the Heritage Foundation president Heritage Foundation is where project 2025 was JD vaner wrote the forward to it Zach mentioned it at some point in this conversation this book among other things is very skeptical of birth control of IVF they are now delaying publication of the book till after the election because again it is political poison I mean you begin to understand why this group of people particular the ones who are not running for office are avowedly pretty skeptical of democracy because the things that might get them I think in their heads at least to where you'd want to go they're not democratically sellable there they things you can't even say aloud sure well yeah I think you're on to something very important here and it's interesting if you look back in sort of the political evolution of JD Vance who some of his influences are so I think Zach mentioned Curtis yarvin AKA menus moldbug um who is a sort of alt-right conservative thinker who's also close friends with Peter teal JD Vance's political mentor and yarvin has written kind of explicitly actually that democracy is no longer working and in fact he is in favor of a sort of monarchist state where there is a ruler at the top who implements laws that shape Society that's explicitly anti-democratic and JD Vance has been in close conversation with him but in general I think we also should note that JD Vance has what I would term kind of a a millennial problem right in that all of his sort of podcasts his writing his previous thinking is kind of on the record it's there on the internet for people to find you know his political rise has been quite fast he was talking to and trying to ingratiate himself with and making relationships in this neoconservative alt-right far-right sphere and was very much open to coming out in favor of these extreme policy positions whether it was the idea of an anti-democratic State and you know taking the leverage of power uh he talked about in the past how actually if Republicans get into power they should you know fire the entirety of the the administrative State and start over over but then you know he has to go into public and talk to the entirety of America now and I think he's realizing or has realized perhaps a little bit too late that the arguments that are very persuasive and seem even common on these online forums and in these integralist or post- liberal online spaces you're right just don't translate to normal people and so in fact it just sounds sort of weird and scary to us yeah the the thing I would add is in the book I try to trace the way in which anti-democratic rhetoric has evolved over time and and one thing that strikes me is that people don't really go after democracy directly anymore at least if you're trying to destroy a democracy that's already established right Donald Trump didn't say we should get rid of elections in 2020 he said votes were stolen from me yes and now he sells himself as the guy who took a bullet for democracy right that's his line on it yeah it's his line right and that that I think that's a really like this is kind of under discussed I think but it's a profound shift in the way that anti-democratic politics works and reflects the fact that democracy has become and still is right the ideological language that we all speak and so you get this kind of double discourse where there's frustrations with the way the democratic system works and the forces that it empowers but an unwillingness to directly leverage critiques of it in ways that are open and naked and clear right as to where they're coming from from and I think this is true increasingly not just for democracy but for its Allied concept liberalism I think a lot of these people underestimated how liberal the population they were trying to appeal to was and they end up realizing that what they're talking about even when they attack elements of liberalism that are unpopular the solutions they propose as Alternatives run into the problems Ezra that that you were just describing so I think this this anti-liberal movement is running up against the problem that liberalism and democracy are very much a package deal for a lot of people um the ideas are are deeply intertwined with each other and many of the attacks uh or the sort of ideas and criticisms of liberalism that they're leveraging strike people not just as weird but also as in a deep sense opposed to the values that is citizens of a democracy that they hold most de [Music] [Music] so I want to turn to the Democrats Christine how would you say they're treating gender this year because it feels to me since Harris has become the presumptive or or even actual now nominee that it feels subtly different than in the past couple of Elections yeah I think you're right about that so I think one way to talk about this is to compare this election with a female presidential candidate to the last election with a female presidential candidate 2016 Hillary Clinton so I mentioned you know earlier in the podcast that you know Hillary's campaign slogan was I'm with her sort of foregrounding the sort of revolution possibility of the first female president kamla Harris on the other hand has not actually spent very much time in fact anytime at all really talking about the idea that she could be the first female president while she has backgrounded her own gender and sort of her own identity in this race so far what we are seeing is foregrounding gendered concerns specifically around abortion I think that we're seeing Democrats make the do's decision you know one of the defining elements of their campaign talking about how the reversal of roie Wade was you know bad for women and anti-democratic and placing that squarely on the Republicans plates and I actually think that this is perhaps maybe a wise strategy for Democrats you know we talked earlier in the podcast about how there is this increasing gender gap and how you know young women and women in particular have become increasingly politically awakened and what would say perhaps even radicalized in a left word Direction by you know the reversal of roie Wade by the meoo moment and you know the visions of sort of patriarchy that they saw behind that by simply the presence of Donald Trump on the political scene so gender has become much more Salient for women it is an exciting factor for women exciting not in the happy way but that it excites a lot of emotion JD van has I think unintentionally put more logs on the fire here by making basically his entire identity and I I don't think he meant to do this but it has happened making his entire identity seem centered around insulting childless cat ladies insulting women who presumably have made their own choices um or even didn't make a choice and don't necessarily feel that happy about it and I think that the Democratic party is going to use that this idea of supporting women and pushing against people who appear not to support women we were talking a second ago Zack about the way on the right the rhetoric has run ahead of the policy and I think dos has allowed the Democrats to be in a much more solid reverse position because it's allowed Democrats to talk about gender in a specific and tangible and normal and and policy oriented way instead of this abstract ideological one it's not an election about ending the the patriarchy or recognizing implicit misogyny it's about abortion it's about row it's about IVF it's about your ability to get birth control in the mail and it seems to me that this has allowed Harris to keep things grounded in a way that you know I think Hillary Clinton had made them sort of more symbolic more philosophical more ideological and way it's also been an interesting contrast from vanson in a different way Trump who don't have like a way of saying this is the thing we are going to do for you they have a way of sort of describing who they like and don't like in the society they want and don't want whereas Harris is like elect me and the thing I will do is try to pass the row protections through Congress yeah if you listen to Harris's speeches or Tim Wall's for that matter there's one word word that they use over and over and over again and that word is freedom right I mean there's a reason Harris's campaign song is literally Freedom by Beyonce right it's that freedom is the master concept that they want to uh latch on to and there's good reason for that right freedom is one of those contested American values that used to be the centerpiece of Republican rhetoric and there's a lot of polling recently I've talked to the pollsters who've done it who show that if you can convince voters that Republicans are anti- Freedom you know and dos was really the opening here dobs and election denial right and trying to steal the 2020 election they're going after your freedom to have the kind of family you want and your freedom to vote those two things end up becoming uh really really powerful in making Democrats seem like the Live and Let Live party right the one that wants to embody the American ethos of freedom and that's the master narrative that Harris is trying to use these policies to sell right she's not just saying vote for me because my policies will give a better world what she's saying is vote for me because I'm the one who stands up for this essential American and crucially liberal value of freedom and that's I think how this entire thing connects right if JD Vance wants to be the candidate of post liberals Harris is is saying great basically I'm going to be the candidate of liberals I'm going to be the candidate of liberalism I'm for freedom and what are you for you're for weird attacks on childless cat ladies and vague ideas about a red society that you don't even really want to own because they're unpopular and it's put her on immensely immensely effective rhetorical ground know whether that's enough to carry her to Victory I that's that political rhetoric doesn't matter that much right that it can be single-handedly swing an election unless it's very very close for other reasons but uh man I mean this this post- liberal Gambit as a pure political matter has put Republicans in the uncomfortable position of being the anti-freedom party I think that's all very right but also you mentioned Tim Walls there Zach and Christine I think walls is interesting in this election both for his own role and for what it says about how Democrats are thinking and talking about gender because we talked earlier about the way I would say in 2016 and 2020 Democrats develop this very complicated and I would say or liberals online liberals maybe this complicated and suspicious relationship to masculinity Tim Kane was Hillary Clinton's vice president or her vice presidential pick but I would not say he was there in any articulated or obvious way for gender she just liked him walls is there among other things but clearly for his performance of masculinity right there's a very Judith Butler Dimension to the walls pick football coach National Guard straight talking midwesterner how do you see walls playing into this yeah in the past Republicans have put themselves forward as the party of men the party of masculinity the Democrats the Liberals are sort of the female party but Tim Waltz versus that vision of masculinity is turning that Vision on its head in the same way that Republicans seem to have gone from the party of freedom to the anti-freedom party they have gone from the party of real masculinity of you know men who shoot guns and work in the yard to I don't know World Wrestling Federation performers whereas Democrats seem to have gone or are trying to go from a party of feminized soy boys as they used to be insulted by Republicans to yes the party of Tim Walls a dad a dad who wears a camouflage hat there the meme circulating of him online of a guy from the Midwest who straight talking loves eating meat and will help you fix your car is on the side of the road and this is a vision of masculinity that is still very stereotypically masculine I mean as you say he's a football coach he was in the military but also positive one might call it a tonic masculinity he's male but he's helpful he supports women but he says he's not trying to be in their business and legislate how they should use their uter ey Republicans used to be the people talking about freedom not this group when they talk about Freedom it means that the government should be free to invade your exam room with your [Applause] doctor look in Minnesota we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make we may we maybe wouldn't make the same choices but we respect them and I know in Minnesota and in Arizona and places across this country you know what makes Society work best is when you learn a golden rule mind your own damn business mind your own damn business we don't need it he's talked about in his interviews how he views the Republican party as having become what he termed the He-Man Woman Haters Club as opposed to presumably his party the Democratic party where men are there and they're helpful but they also love women so this is a vision of masculinity that I think Democrats think will play across America it's a very recognizable one but it's a friendly one it's a downto earth one it's not a frightening one in the same way that Donald Trump was trying to portray but an approachable one I don't know how to describe this exactly but something I've noticed in this whole process that led to walls and really the whole movement to the Harris campaign is this emergence of playfulness around things that Democrats treated with incredible heaviness a couple of years ago so there's a movement from Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy to he's a weirdo online it was completely understood that kamla Harris was looking for the most white male white male in the midwest she could find maybe you'd also consider Andy Basher maybe You' consider Pete Buddha judge but there was a joking about it the white dudes for Harris call had this too I don't know they're holding it all a lot more lightly they liked walls in the end among other things because there's a playfulness to him I thought it was very telling how in the speech he gave on being introduced as vice president or vice presidential candidate he talked about the importance of Harris's Joy but it's not just that they're happier in the race all of a sudden but that they're willing to be a little bit self mocking a a lot of things here have had a a slight irony to them that I've really not seen from the Democratic Coalition in a minute I mean I think there's there's two things going on here is first the internal left culture war that began really in 2020 the series of cascading fights surrounding wokeness or whatever you want to call it has really petered off the energy that used to surround those topics is gone and I think this is one of those baked thoughts that I think is true but I'm going to pause it as a theory here but is that there's kind of been a truce a sense that okay some people went a little bit too far in the way that they were talking about identity and privileging it and giving it this totemic significance and building politics around it in 2020 but it's also the case that the people who were so vehemently against that and demanding the party return to some version where we didn't really acknowledge or talk about identity concerns that didn't win the day either right it's not like we've returned to a pre-2020 Democratic party it's like the identity revolution in left-wing politics has been incorporated into the liberal Coalition but it has done so in a way that sanded off the self-righteousness that a lot of people found unappealing about it so it's kind of a um a happy synthesis not just a ceasefire but a peace agreement that created a kind of new understanding of what the left is and the second thing that I think is very important in this is that people got really tired of being upset all the time it is really really really hard to sustain high levels of anger and dudgeon about virtually everything that's happening and there's also a recognition that this kind of General bad vibes thing is bad for democracy it's bad for our society right it's like when people don't believe that the country is going in a good Direction when they don't have faith in social institutions that's stuff really is poison to the ability to construct a coherent polity and really gives rise to a reactionary politics of Citizen versus Citizen and so for a movement that wants to be about inclusion about making this the watch word of what it means to be a liberal in America or democrat in America you need to bring some of these happier Vibes and anecdotally talking to Democrats they all compare this to early Obama right to 2008 Obama but concrete example that you can give of this this shift too has to do with again the influences that are happening on the on the political scene right now if 2016 and to some extent 2020 you saw a lot of the 4chan election or the 8chan election this an election and a Republican party and conservative movement that was actually fueled by these creepy message boards with a lot of angry and upset usually young men sharing kind of alarmingly racist memes this year seems to be the Tik Tock election and Tik Tok is a platform that is enforcedly all about happiness and Good Vibes it's about people singing and dancing and sharing joy and KLA Harris's memes don't emerge from the dark corners of the internet the way that the Pepe the Frog memes emerged in 2016 but from the light corners of the internet where people are doing the Apple Dance and that is just a energy that we're seeing on social media and that has actually floated pretty heavily into the election season I think that idea Christine that this is more of a Tik Tock election is actually really wise I think elections are often defined by emergent media fors I think that Obama was the candidate of early Facebook sort of early social media online organizing Trump was a candidate of Twitter and algorithmic social media where you could really Vault to the front of the American conversation by being extreme and leading to highly conflictual engagement I think in a way Biden represented a sort of exhaustion and that Harris represents a sort of movement towards Tik Tok somehow both her and walls in very different ways are incredibly memeable and it gets I guess to my one of my half fake theories of this which is that putting even the platforms aside I do think that there's a process by which the way that online ideologies move is that they often have a fair core point but the Dynamics of algorithmic platforms push things towards extremism towards ingroup policing towards a kind of purification a looking for who is really committed and who isn't I think JD Vans kind of represents this on the magga right right now and that Democrats went through that and it it metabolized over time that where they were online in 2020 which had I think very important things like I'm one of these people who who like the wokeness backlash has gone too far that there were very important insights in wokeness but it also went too far in terms of speech policing in terms of the general sort of extremism of it the sort of movement of academic Concepts into places where they didn't really fit and the fact that that wasn't a way you could talk to people who you needed their votes and they weren't in your movement it's something I just see in Harrison wall s is and I guess this is getting what you said Zack it's just kind of metabolized it's there but it is softened I mean kala Harris is an important pick from an identity perspective KLA Harris does represent and actually think about a lot of these questions but in part because they are now embedded in the campaign they're not talking like Twitter or X they're talking like people who want to win Pennsylvania and it's made me wonder a little bit is the right just sort of behind in this life cycle maybe there's a couple years behind the emergence of like a MAA ideology figuring out how to be an electoral force or maybe they have different Dynamics it's going to keep it more extreme and keep it in sort of YouTube comment section uh Vibes but they feel like they're in different parts of the life cycle right now to me yeah I think that's right I think that's a really interesting Insight the idea of metabolization I guess the question is how long does it usually take and I think the way that you are describing Harrison Wallace as having kind of finished that process and emerged as sort of a Clear Vision of the party as something that the right hasn't yet achieved I mean we talked a little earlier about how in some ways Trump sort of represents the classic bar stool libertarian view of the Republican party and Vance with his illiberal religious oriented ideals feels a little bit grafted onto to the ticket that graft and the sort of like lack of connection between the two still feels very evident and when you look at what's happening in the Republican party and the conservative movement at large still you can see that it's still working to figure out where this illiberal post- liberal movement fits in with the rest of its platform my question though is how long that is going to take and if in fact it is even possible for you know a movement that feels that that extreme and kind of extremely opposed to even the most moderate normal Republicans to be actually digested like their Visions are pretty far out compared to the average American but yes even the average Republican yeah I mean one thing that working on this book on anti-democratic right-wing politics convinced me of is that conservative political parties are not just good but essential for a democracy to function a conservative political party serves as an organizing vehicle for people who have attachments to the way that Society operates to traditional social hierarchies to gender Norms to you know the the class interests of the wealthy and to say okay we are going to be able to be part of this system and we are going to be able to operate inside of it in a way that advance and defend elements of the status quo that we find valuable while trying to accommodate whatever kinds of liberal changes the electorate wants and I think the problem with the current makeup of the Republican Party under Trump is that function of the conservative party has been repressed and sort of banished it's having difficulty adjusting to a Democratic party that is at ease with itself because the Republican party is not at ease with itself and it hasn't been for quite some time there are many people inside of it who still want the Republican party to be what it used to be which is that the kind of conservative party that I was talking about a second ago but under Trump and Vance who embody different kinds of reactionary conservatism but as much as we talk about Trump as having barstol approaches to gender his approach to race and immigration and inclusion and other spectrums is unbelievably reactionary I mean much further to the right of a lot of European right parties and certainly when it comes to his attitude towards democracy right which Vance shares and that core conflict over the question of what is the Republican party for doesn't just speak to where it stands on the 2020 election Latino immigration to the United States or where it stands on talking to young men about their interests it speaks to what the party is in a deep and existential sense and the the unease and the unhappiness that seems to radiate from a lot of this post- liberal variant of the GOP that we're seeing is reflective of the fact that this issue remains unsettled this identity question remains a source of deep internal conflict and one that it has been put off in any kind of final resolution because the person of Donald Trump is so powerful that anyone who attempted to challenge him would be shot down the real question is whether this will continue without Trump's force of personality and what happens if he loses now if he wins things are I mean well well then then there's a whole set of different concerns that come into play but if we're just sort of operating under the assumption that there's going to have to be a conservative movement Reckoning with some failures of trumpism an assumption that may or may not be true it's very much an open question as to whether the Republican Party can return to being a conservative party I think that's a good place to end so then always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience and Christine why don't we begin with you sure so three books that I've been reading recently two are I guess related to this moment and one is also related to this moment but in a different way so first most recently I read El Reeves black pill which has actually been reviewed in the times it's about the transition from the sort of incel sphere to the alt right and it is AIC read it would almost be a beach read how interesting it is if it weren't so scary a second book that I would recommend is what are children for on ambivalence and choice and this is by Anastasia ber and Rachel wisman and IT addresses the question of why young people aren't having kids and it sort of goes through the arguments in a philosophical sense trying to sort of deeply engage with the worries that people have whether metaphysical or material and I actually just wrote a piece about this how they identify that this question of meaning is really necessary in decision making and then finally and I think because this is a podcast I'm assuming it's a safe space for a little bit of nerdery Ezra absolutely but one of the things that we've seen in the news recently is how the new Wright and JD Vance in particular along with his mentor Peter teal have been influenced intensely by JRR tolken and Lord of the Rings I was a big Lord of the Rings fan and honestly still am yeah me too so I have just started rereading the Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR tolken and I would recommend it to others yeah I refuse to give away Lord of the Rings it's not happening everybody gets to be influenced by it in their own way but that's right we all we I'm not handing that over we all love toen I think I think it's got to be for everyone America can unite around this Zach how about you um all right so I've got three uh quite different ones the first one is Justice gender and the family by Susan Muller Oaken which I think is a really classic and sort of underappreciated and popular discourse treatment of liberal feminism an account of what it means to be a liberal and a feminist how liberalism should think about feminism and the question of gender inequality that fits very well into well I mean it speaks to some of the things that the people we've been talking about are concerned about right it starts with an ackn M of gender inequality in the home and how that should be a central political problem the second book is cultural backlash by Pepa Norris and Ron Englehart they're two political scientists and one thing that they do really nicely is use data from around the world to show how a particular kind of authoritarian populism depends very heavily on cultural themes and are is really rooted in a sense of social change cascading social changes dislocating people from around the world and their use of data in particular I find very um very helpful in trying to sort through the very very very different causal stories people tell about the rise of far-right movements including ones that oriented and focus on gender and the last one I think sort of speaks to our conversation at the very end which is a book called conservative parties and the birth of democracy by Daniel ziblat where he argues that European countries that had very differentl political arcs in terms of their movement towards democracy being smooth or not in the 19th and early 20th century depended very heavily on whether they had an institutionalized conservative party one that could speak to the entrenched interests like say the church and its vested commitments to traditional gender ideas that could smooth over fears about democracy imperiling traditional social norms uh and the distribution of wealth so it really speaks to what conservative parties are for in a way that I find very helpful even as it seems like to a lot of people a conservative party that has such agressive views on things like gender could never be part of a democratic landscape uh zlad argues that that's not the case in a very revealing and useful way I'll note that we had PPP and Norris on the show to talk about cultural backlash which is I think one of the most useful episodes we've done for understanding this kind of politics we'll put a link in show notes Christine emba Zack beum thank you very much thanks Ezra thank [Music] you this episode of the eclan show is produced by Annie Galvin factchecking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker our senior engineer is Jeff G with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and ammen sahota our senior editor is Clare Gordon the show's production team also includes Roland who Elias iswith and Kristen Lynn we have original music by Isaac Jones audience strategy by Christina Samy luki and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is an RO ster and special thanks to Sonia Herrero [Music]