Episode 42: 2024 Election Debrief, Part I

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Laura Donegan.

And this is Inbed with the Right doing an election debrief.

So I don't know why I sounded so pricky just now.

Yeah, I mean, I have been dreading this one, Adrian.

It's like it's a root canal.

We won't be a bummer for the whole time.

You know, we're going to try and see what we can learn, both from the results themselves and from sort of the conversation surrounding the election results.

And then we're going to try and look forward and try and get this all in perspective and see what it means for American gender politics going forward, which I think looks very different on this side.

We've held off.

We thought about doing an immediate reaction that was just going to be us going, fuck.

Yeah, like me crying.

I don't know.

It would not have been great for our listeners.

Like me eating pudding very quietly.

You know, while Mara cries, that's my coping.

I'm not super emotion, but I do kind of love me a pudding when I really need it.

But there is a reason, other than we didn't want to, why we didn't do this right away.

Because I have, I personally have this B in my bonnet when it comes to any election analysis, right?

That like it has to kind of include two things.

There's what happened in the election, and then there's what the various actors, whether they're political parties, the press, et cetera, et cetera, sort of like think or frame happened.

And those three things usually aren't totally unrelated, but they're not the same thing, right?

The question of which groups and which messages made a difference and the question who the incoming government thinks made a difference, like those are two separate questions.

And a lot of the early punditry, you couldn't tell whether this was a genuine reading of, you know, let's be clear, a vote picture that is still emerging.

There's still, I believe, votes being counted in parts of the country as we record this.

And how much of it was just pundits kind of beating up on their favorite targets that they would have beaten up on no matter what the data said, right?

Yeah.

And I think that's honestly particularly important with a politician like Donald Trump, who has, let's say, both a kind of transactional approach to politics and a deeply Manichaean worldview, right?

You're either with him or against him.

You either matter to him or you don't.

And I do think that puts a particular onus on election analysis after the fact, because it may well influence how various groups are treated and how policies are implemented in the next four years and possibly right beyond, which is to say that when someone right now says like, oh, we should have beaten up on X group or Y group and then surely Kamala Harris would have won, like you're basically creating the discursive environment in which that very group is going to be set upon in the incoming Trump administration.

And your analysis of what allegedly happened in this election has material impact on what's going to happen to different groups and regions of the country in the coming months and years.

So that's why we didn't want to sort of shoot from the hip when it comes to these results.

We wanted to kind of think through what we can sort of tell from the data.

And of course, as always, we're going to be focusing on the question of gender.

So yeah, I'm glad we took a couple days, but we're back to try and muddle through all of this.

And I'm glad, Adrian, that you took a look at like the post-election commentary, which has really sort of settled into two overlapping camps, right?

You know, in this ritual post-lost Democratic and lefty self-flagellation, there's kind of like two narratives of what happened.

One is sort of what we could call like the Bernie Sanders narrative, which is that I think his catchphrase was, you know, the working class abandoned a party that abandoned them, right?

The Democrats have not made sufficient policy moves towards the interest of working class voters, particularly in these like post-industrial heartland, Midwest, and South districts, right?

So, that's like one theory of the case.

And then the second theory of the case is that the Democrats are too woke.

And that's, and you know, sometimes you do hear these coming from the same people, right?

They can be kind of two sides of the same coin.

This notion that cultural and economic issues are different, that they are clearly distinguishable, and that the Democrats only favor one of them, right?

So that they did too much around race and gender,

that feminists were too angry and this made men alienated, no question about whether women have anything to feel alienated or angry about,

you know, and that young men's sort of disaffection, young white men's disaffection

and working class men's disaffection is righteous and that it is caused by the Democratic Party's cultural politics excesses, right?

That's kind of the other one.

And so you've got like, you need to do more for the working class, right?

On the one hand.

And then there's, you need to shut the fuck up about like me too and trans people, right?

And it really does seem to be gender politics in particular that are coming in in the post-election commentary as like the Democrats scapegoat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

It's identity politics with this really interesting illusion that as someone who studied the kind of phrase identity politics for quite some time, with this kind of new extension, which I think you've already sort of implicitly pointed to, which is the analysis kind of seems to posit or seems to agree that abortion is ultimately an identity politics issue.

That is to say, it's sort of grouped in with dignity arguments around various interest groups, which to me seems already kind of tricky, right?

You tend to emphasize that, you know, abortion is a dignity harm to women and that it very clearly is understood that way by many voters.

It is not only that, right?

Like the ability to participate fully in society is what this is ultimately about, which surely is an economic issue as well.

In the framing after the election, I think the very fact that sort of like when people say identity issues, right, as you say, they point to trans people and they point to women and to abortion.

And you're like, well, first of all the Democrats did not thematize trans people.

There's the other party did that, right?

It's not that they ran affirmatively on, you know, Leah Thomas's right to compete in college meets, right?

Like, that was not, that was not a Democratic pitch.

But it also sort of seems to agree that basically, like, it'd be nice to have abortion, but like, it's not part of the real meat of politics.

And I think that is like not just pouring out the baby with the bathwater, that's pouring out the baby with the bathwater and then smashing the fucking tub.

Well, it's an analysis that presumes, as much of this does sort of subsexually, that the only legitimate voters, the only real legitimate political subjects are men or women to the extent that they understand themselves as men functionally or like, you know, men plus

or, you know, not voting on gendered issues, right?

That the legitimate gender grievance is always the male gendered grievance, right?

Because at the same time that abortion is downplayed as a material concern, men's very immaterial sense of malaise is being elevated, right?

As like a great moral crisis.

So you really just see a gender hierarchy at work, right?

And boys just matter more than girls in this worldview.

But you're also sort of, we're circling around two errors that I see in these election post-mortems, right?

One is a factual error, because the fact of the matter is that Biden ran the kind of economic policies that Bernie Sanders wants.

You know, he really did focus a lot of his presidency on, you know, industrial policy that would help the Midwest and the South on bringing in, particularly like green jobs, so places like Georgia, on encouraging union work, right?

Sustainable union jobs were the big Biden economic policy agendas and like robust antitrust regulation.

You know, these were, these were the kind of left-wing Bernie Sanders type of policy wins, right?

There's a reason that Bernie Sanders and AOC and that cadre of the Democratic congressional representatives and senators did not pressure Biden to resign, right?

Because they had actually had a degree of influence in the Biden White House.

So economically, Biden ran the kind of policy agenda that I think Bernie Sanders would have encouraged, right?

And he's acting now like he didn't win those fights over the past four years.

But then there's also conceptually, and this really touches on what you were talking about, which is is the idea that you can separate out culture and economic issues at all, right?

Right.

You know, in our focus, we talk a lot about how women and, you know, minority gender oppressed people, like trans people, queer people, experience these dignity harms simultaneously as material harms, right?

Right.

Right.

Like if you can't get an abortion, that shit is expensive.

Right.

You are physically harmed by what happens to your body against your will and you are diverted from the workforce and you are forced to spend a lot of money and earn a lot less money.

You know, like that is a extremely materially tangible

violence that is being done to you, right?

If you are trans and you can't access your health care, your body will physically change.

That is material harm, right?

If you are trans and you are stigmatized socially for not being able to pass, or if you are subjected to violence for not being able to pass, that's a material harm.

Fired from a job, yeah, yeah, fired from a job or discriminated against for not being able to pass.

That's a material harm.

If you experience psychic distress at your inability to transition, that can prevent you from being able to work, right?

These are real long-term effects that flow downstream from these quote-unquote dignity harms that are being dissuaded as identity politics.

The flip side of this is that these majorities

also understand

economic rhetoric to be bound up in their own dignity and status aspirations and resentments, right?

Right.

When they talk about being working class and feeling like Trump is standing up for the little guy and Democrats represent the elites, right?

That is about their own sense of deprived status that can be often quite explicitly is racial and gender resentment, right?

This is sort of presented by a lot of Marxists as a bait and switch, right?

Like, oh, they are supplicated with the ability to oppress women or beat their wives in the home as sort of a compensation for

the indignities that they suffer at work, right?

I think it's a little more complicated than that.

I think they see

these entitlements to control over women, to superiority over people of color, to having these lower status people they can lord over and have contempt for and see as their enemies.

I think they see that as an asset the same way that they see their jobs as an asset.

I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.

I do want to sort of, well, not necessarily push back, but just kind of ask, you're right, there is a version of this critique that simply assumes that cultural issues are distinct from economic ones.

And then there's the other one, the sort of more, I think, sort of like more wonkish version of this critique that says what the exit polls and what the results, especially of the abortion referenda vis-a-vis Kamala Kamala Harris's performance, suggests, is that voters, even if they're not distinct, they are able to make that distinction.

And that's a problem for Democrats.

Like, what would you say to that?

That is a slightly different critique.

It's not saying, like, they might all say, yeah, I agree that these are at root linked.

The problem is somehow the Democrats are not able to tie them together effectively.

Yeah, I mean, you're referring, I think, to one phenomenon that reflects a broader trend in this election, which is split ticket voting, right?

Right.

This was not a thing for a long time.

We had been told over and over that split-ticket voting was over, that people had partisan identities and senses of self.

That seems to have stopped, at least in this election, as we undergo a process of what's being called dealignment, right?

And people are sort of rearranging themselves across party lines and in relation to several issues.

And that has produced a lot of split ticket voting among them.

You see pro-abortion or pro-choice referenda passing in states that Trump won, right?

You also see Trump winning states where Democrats won Senate seats.

Right.

So like Tammy Baldwin, for instance,

held on to her seat in a hotly contested race in Wisconsin.

Trump picked up Wisconsin, right?

Abortion ballot measures passed in states

like Missouri, which went heavily for Trump and actually didn't just like protect existing abortion legality, but overturned a ban that is in effect, right?

Yeah.

Even Florida went for Trump by something like possibly double digits, like an insane margin.

400%.

Yeah.

Florida, very, very red state, right?

Their abortion ballot measure failed, but only because it had a 60% threshold.

It got 57, you know?

Yeah.

57%.

That's not especially close, right?

That is a like real mandate for abortion rights.

Right.

And that means that people are seeing abortion in particular, but I think several other issues also, as something that they can separate in their vote for Trump, right?

And we can talk about like specific rationales behind that.

You know, like people think Trump isn't very serious about his anti-abortion commitments.

Like we can talk about like the causes for that perception and the degree to which it's justified or not.

I have a lot of thoughts about that.

We can refer people to your column, which makes a good case for this.

I mean, for those of you who, you know, don't want to click the link, which we'll put in the show notes, TLDR, these people are kidding themselves, but still, it's an interesting kind of question about

what are the conditions for the possibility of this disjuncture, right?

Right.

I think something that I really believe

is that when people are voting, well, okay.

No, I'm lying.

Cut this because I just realized I don't totally believe what I'm saying.

No, that's just great.

This This is all staying in.

I think there are at least some people,

and they may have been a determining number.

There are some people who are voting for Trump for reasons that are not policy-based.

Yeah.

And something you've seen, this might make a decent segue into the next part of our conversation, which is where we wanted to talk about the difference between the pre- and post-election understandings of the race.

Because before the election, up to the day, the very day of the election, we had, or at least the media I was consuming, had depicted this race as really a referendum on Trump and specifically as being a referendum on Trump's proposed vision of gender, right?

In this post-Dobbs world, Trump had really leaned into male identity grievance and a kind of politicized misogyny.

He had elevated these fringe figures to places of prominence as his surrogates.

And in his campaign, you know, they had a viral video of a guy who worked for his campaign making a like quote-unquote joke about repealing the 19th Amendment.

He had elevated J.D.

Vance to a position of prominence who just can't stop talking about childless cat ladies and his desire to breed.

He had gotten really close to the billionaire Elon Musk, who has several sexual misconduct allegations, appears to have constructed a compound for this harem of women who have given birth to his children in Texas and is threatening celebrities like Taylor Swift with insemination.

He has elevated Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., who has sexual assault allegations against him.

There's a slew of misogyny that was really joyously deployed and foregrounded in the Trump campaign, right?

That accounting of the fact that he ran that campaign, like a pretty hatefully, vulgarly, grossly anti-woman campaign, and that he then won, that has been completely absent from post-election analysis.

It is like, it's almost verboten to talk about.

Yeah.

Maybe it's perceived that doing so would be doubling down on this like quote-unquote cultural politics that apparently only the Democrats run on.

But I think that the Republicans ran on a kind of cultural politics, right?

The Republicans ran very much on their own identity politics and it worked for them.

They won.

So I am interested, Adrian, in what you think about the disappearance of gender from the post-election, or at least from this vision of gender rights, from the post-election post-mortems.

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting.

And I think if people want to see the one counterexample I can think of, it's Kate Mann's wonderful substack essay about this exact question.

I think there's two things happening, right?

Like suddenly, the idea that this wasn't about gender is kind of everywhere, like, both on the democratic side, where it's like, you know, well, we had the problem with the incumbency, she had a short runway, well, things that are true, but you know, but it's not sort of looking the issue really in the face, nor sort of on the side that wants to clearly whitewash or launder what happened, and which now says, like, well, this is about Democrats not being able to deliver a sense of security, of promise, et cetera, et cetera.

And you think, like, gee, most of the threats that they were actually campaigning on are completely made up, right?

It's Haitians eating cats.

But the other funny thing, of course, is that it has completely, as far as I can tell, left the media, and I mean, including left-leaning and or at least by its self-conception, centrist media, completely unequipped for Trump's team, for the people he's now bringing in, right?

Like NPR, the New York Times having a really hard time.

I mean, they don't even get to the sexual assault allegations against designated Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., right?

They barely can even get to the fact that he would like kill a bunch of kids by making vaccines harder to access, right?

Similarly, right, I mean, the fact that like the one through line and all these kind of, well, you don't know what to call them.

Are they trolling appointments or are they appointments that are meant to kind of tease out just how differential a Republican Congress will be to this administration?

Whatever the point is, the neuralgic point that he is planning to use to figure out how much can I do before, you know, Jon Thune,

you know, incoming Senate leader, before he basically says, like, that's enough, right?

Like, the way they're testing that is by bringing people with absolutely insane gender politics into this administration.

Matt Gaetz.

Matt Gaetz, yeah.

The alleged trial sex trafficker, the guy who was said to have shown nudes of random women to colleagues on the floor of the house, and who also has a weird son.

This is apparently our next attorney general.

Have you heard about his weird son?

Yeah, I didn't entirely understand that.

I don't totally follow, but I think the suggestion is that there's a weird sex thing going on.

Another.

I think with Matt Gates, that seems to be a reliable bet that that's the allegation.

I was joking on Blue Sky that it's a big tent, but it's just not allowed within 100 feet of the school.

I mean, it's worth kind of thinking about, right?

Like, this is something that I have not seen remarked on in mainstream media at all, right?

There are, like, it's very clear that Trump is, like, he may also just like like rapists and just.

I think he affirmatively is pro-rape.

I think he understands sexual violence as a confirmation of his virility.

And I think he understands it as an asset and sign of the strength of character of the men who commit it, right?

That is a, that is a demonstration of their masculinity and their power, and he respects it.

I think he's a personally pro-rape guy.

Yeah, but at the same time, I think it's important to note that like functionally, what the Gates appointment is supposed to do is test the loyalty of the legislative branch, right?

To see how far advice and consent will really go with all this.

Now, he could have just picked a bunch of people who were at the Capitol on January 6th that would do the exact fucking same thing, right?

Like, I'm taking convicted felons who like, who like try to like take a shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk.

I'm going to appoint them to a bunch of things, right?

That would do the same thing, but it's not.

It's not what he does.

The route is always, as you say, through questions of sexual domination.

That is the language by which he kind of looks to,

you know, cuck the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.

Maybe.

You know, I do think there's, like, you mentioned Trump as having a very transactional view of politics, right?

And there's a way in which these appointments have just been rewarding loyalists, right?

You can read the tea leaves of them and see like some of his priorities.

Yeah, but Matt Gates, like you could have just, Eileen Cannon is like sitting by her phone, right?

Like she could do this.

She's no dumber than Gates, you know?

Yeah, you know, or, you know, John, Jonathan Mitchell.

We'll also see who the Solicitor General appointee is.

But I think part of it is about rewarding

people he sees as loyal to him.

And I think it's also about who he thinks has the right look.

Yeah.

He talks a lot about the right look.

So this like little Odyssey's little Nazi from Fox News who's being appointed to run the DOD.

he very much has the right look, right?

He looks like a Kendall.

He, you know, with the

Nazi tattoos, or I think it's Crusader tattoos, excuse me.

Appointment seems to be in large part about who Trump personally likes, who Trump thinks will take orders from him with the least pushback, and who he thinks will look good on TV.

Yeah.

The Deus Volt guy does seem like the answer to the question, why use 14 words when two words will do, right?

The domination style of politics that Trump is bringing to these appointments is the same that he brought to the gender politics of his campaign, right?

Like, I think, Adrian, you're right that partly this is a exercise in asserting his power over the other branches of government, right?

He seems to be trying to convert the Senate into a rubber stamp.

He seems to be trying to consolidate control over the military.

And part of this is daring

politicians to stand up to him who he knows will not stand up to him.

And in so doing, to demonstrate his dominance, right?

So it's, it's a, it's a, like a state craft that partakes of the same logic as sexual violence.

Right.

I mean, there's that famous picture of him and Mitt Romney at dinner, which is exactly, I always think of that, which is, which is just that.

Yeah, you know, Marco Rubio is going to be our secretary of state who was humiliated with that whole little Marco primary campaign, right?

He was like, talk about emasculation.

He just called him small.

And that

ruined that guy's career until he decided to abandon his neocon past and apparently also all his self-respect that he may have ever had.

Did he have self-respect?

To join the Trump campaign.

Well,

the absence of it has certainly paid off for him now, right?

Yeah, good job.

Congratulations, Marco.

The other thing this raises, right?

Like, in some way, I think you're right to point out that there's this real break and this kind of amnesia that comes along with the before and the after of coverage in in or before election coverage and post-election coverage, right?

And at the same time, as you point out, Trump is being nothing if not consistent.

He follows one logic and he has telegraphed this for all those of us who hate the man

to see, right?

And yet, you know, the media is somehow twisting itself into pretzels to basically not see the continuity here.

It does raise the question of information systems, doesn't it?

Like, why didn't this break?

If someone is constantly shifting their positions, you can say like, okay, like, people are not that invested in politics.

It's really hard to keep track, et cetera, et cetera.

As you're pointing out, the through line is unmistakable.

The pitch is unmistakable.

Now, there clearly are voters who went in for it and seem to be impressed by it and seem to like it.

At the same time, I do think that the abortion referenda do kind of suggest that that's not every Trump voter.

There are Trump voters who genuinely make a distinction there, see a difference there that, like, as you point out, it's really hard to sustain.

What is it about our information ecosystems that maybe played a role in that process?

I do think there is an information story to be told here.

But I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right?

And they are voting for the spirit of resentment.

They are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking.

They are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right?

And that spirit, that like vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification, and like fun resentment, right?

That is an emotional register that contains,

can contain a ton of contradictions, right?

So you can be

pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right?

And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, right?

But they do support the animating feature behind those policies, right?

The sort of spirit of, you know, sadistic jeering, fuck you.

Like that's what they really like.

They enjoy the anger.

But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

Like this information ecosystem is dog shit.

It is impossible to get reliable information.

The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore.

So they're listening to a lot of fucking podcasts.

A lot of goddamn podcasters.

Fuck them.

I hate those guys.

They're listening to podcasters.

They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels.

You know, they're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them, you know, over burgers, right?

There's like this ambient disinformation and a sort of corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, like a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves like facts and policy mattering, right?

Like what Trump is going to do, I think, is like attempt mass deportations, embezzle a ton of money and like just strip the government for parts, right?

Do a ton of privatization, a ton of like just outright fraud fraud and self-dealing.

Yeah.

And I think he's going to do a big corporate tax cut, right?

Which is not an anti-establishment, I'm fighting for you against the neoliberals kind of a move, right?

Yeah.

But none of that is going to penetrate to his actual voters, right?

They will just see his vibe of anger and of, you know,

vulgarity and,

you know, the way he makes people they find annoying annoying mad, right?

That's all they're going to see.

And that's what they're going to get in place of the policy outcomes that would actually improve their lives.

Yeah, there was a, I forget who tweeted this, but there was a great tweet very early on about the idea that kind of contradicting what we had talked about with Morgan Sung in our...

immediate pre-election episode where we said like is there such a thing as for a campaign as being too online and this person was raising the question like is there such a thing as a campaign that is not online enough at this point right like it it turns out that a lot of people were on the exact same wavelength.

We hear weird Twitter beef about like trans athletes and we think like, does this really resonate with normies?

And it turns out there's a sizable segment of normies that it absolutely resonates with.

Or you can make them care about shit if you're online enough, right?

Like they weren't thinking about trans athletes because there's like fucking four of them in the whole country, right?

It's like not a real problem.

But there were probably four million TikToks that they saw about it.

Right.

And they saw those.

They saw, did you see this ad?

Yeah.

Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you.

Yeah.

That they saw that they played that several times during every single fucking football game.

You know, like that was put in front of people over and over and over again.

And so the campaign, that the forces behind this, candidly, the money behind it, made that a salient issue.

Right.

Because people will be led to care about horseshit

that doesn't matter.

What Trump does very well that I think people do like is he gives people an enemy.

And that enemy can be like so capacious and expansive, this big they, that a lot of their pre-existing frustrations and grievances can get sort of slotted into this imprecise Trumpian vision.

So I think you've...

you do a really good job in sort of highlighting what people get out of voting for Trump in a kind of of antagonistic fashion, like the people they want to see squirm, the people they hate and they want to see put down.

But something that I'm sort of coming around to is that just because I have an extremely hard time understanding Trump as an identificatory figure or as like an aspirational figure at all, like it doesn't mean that he doesn't function that way to a lot of Americans.

And part of the thing that I keep coming back to is like, you know, when you and I say like he's just some weird grifter who's trying to strip the government for parts, like we say that thinking everyone's going to be like, yeah, that sounds terrible, man.

But that's the thing.

Like there is in our highly onlineified world, there is a growing part of the population that ultimately, you know, is hustling online.

And like there is a kind of recognition of the kind of we'll say anything for eyeballs kind of logic that Trump brings to the table.

And frankly, the desperation he brings to the table might be their desperation, the way he feels, seems unprepared, unclear where he is, and whatever.

That is, fully understand the irony of saying this on a podcast, like that is the flop sweat of everyone who is just like pointing their camera at themselves and like trying to sort of like get eyeballs, get attention

and make money that way.

Like there's been this narrative around the election about the rightward shift of Silicon Valley and the tech bro.

And I think If you look at the election results in the Bay Area, it's very hard to sustain that claim.

What you probably do get are two things.

The people at the very top, sort of your Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, et cetera, et cetera.

Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg, that feel a lot more emboldened in positioning themselves in a pro-Trump camp than they would have been four or eight years ago.

And then on the very other end of the spectrum, you get the people who depend on these people's platforms, right?

Your crypto miners, your low-rent content producers, et cetera, et cetera, who depend the way a serf depends on the feudal lord on the platforms that these men have created, these men control, and who nevertheless see sort of greater commonality with them, precisely in this kind of hucksterism, in this kind of gig slash grift economy, than they do with the true kinds of people, right?

You and me, the intellectuals, blah, blah, blah.

Where?

Where are the intellectuals?

They're not in this Zoom chat.

But also, but also like union guys, right?

Like that's also right like who don't know that kind of precarity either the the flip side of this right that the precarity the desperation the the grift right the like clear needfulness around money and attention that characterizes trump does i think characterize a lot of our economy right now.

And then also the other side is that the things he's threatening to destroy, democracy, the liberal order, right?

The things that he is antagonizing or that he's posed as a threat to, the institutions, the government that he's going to strip for parts, right?

It's not just that Trump pisses off people they don't like,

like you and me.

I think we are the ideal of like people that Trump voters want to hurt.

We're like gay nerds in glasses who work for Stanford, you know, like we are getting wedgies in this coming administration for sure.

But, you know, it's not just that they hate us.

It's that the institutions that Trump is a threat to are not not doing anything for them.

Right.

Right.

It is hard, I think, for the average Trump voter, by which I mean like the Trump voter that this pundit class imagines, you know, like white working class 25-year-old guy in the Midwest.

I think it's hard for that guy to look at democracy and be like, well, what, like, this is something I want to preserve.

Right.

Yeah.

What the fuck do I give a shit if they're going to eliminate the Department of Education?

Right.

Like he gets narcissistic gratification and status gratification out of hating women, out of hating immigrants, but he also doesn't really see much to preserve in democracy because those institutions are sclerotic, right?

What the fuck is Congress doing?

What have they been doing for the past 20 years?

They can't pass legislation anymore, right?

They can barely hold hearings anymore.

So it's not clear what there is really to preserve that Trump is a threat to.

Yeah.

Well, other than security, as the state gets more and more hollowed out, what it can project is the ability to keep you safe, which is where border walls and deportations become sort of the most visible things that a government can do, right?

This is what you see in the populist turns in European countries, right?

Like where all these populist parties, you know, again, like seem to have no intention of actually using the government to better people's lives, but what they do do is tell them we're going to, you know, we're going to keep you safe in some weird sort of metaphysical way.

Right.

The police state,

the military, the security apparatus, that's like largely all that the state is, at least in a lot of these imaginations, right?

I think about how like a lot of the far right has adopted the thin blue line flag, right?

Where it's just black and white except for this one blue stripe, and that's supposed to represent the police in a way that that's that's kind of a propos, right?

Because like, what else is the American flag meant to symbolize, right?

There's no like robust federal government that will be working to uplift you out of poverty, right?

Like we, I just talked about the Biden administration's effort to do this, which were, you know, by the numbers, fairly successful, but they're not really penetrating the psyche of these guys, right?

To them, all they're really seeing the state as being is that apparatus of violence and surveillance, right?

That's kind of, that's all she wrote for them.

It's also the only part of it that they see as effective in their own lives and it's the only one that they kind of can identify with.

Yeah.

And we'll see if that's what they get, you know, if they will strip the government for parts and sort of only leave a military apparatus in this place, or if they'll go the J.D.

Vance, Adrian Vermuel route and start distributing women to every incel

and using a robust administrative state for that.

You know, only time will tell.

Yeah.

We'll be following this story for the coming months and years until they drag us away from our microphones.

And

yeah, we should probably conclude because this is not a video podcast, so you can't see this.

But before I sat down to record, um i forgot to turn on the lights in my study yeah it's very creepy adrian on the screen is just illuminated by the screen i look like i'm like the the horror the horror like that's how i feel i do look like marlon brando in in apocalypse now right now so we'll leave it at that and we'll we'll obviously have a lot more to say i hope that our first reaction has been at least a little illuminating did i depress our poor listeners too much speaking of which fuck oh yeah please subscribe to our Patreon.

Yes.

It's been really fun.

We have a Discord going.

We've got bonus episodes.

And we have lots of great content coming up.

It's been like the highlight of my dark week, you know, so I have really loved it.

And I love you guys to be a part of it.

We love hearing from you.

It's going to be a rough couple of months, but let's get through this together.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you for listening.

In Bed with a Right, I'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Cortillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.