Episode 33: The VP Debate

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, this is a special emergency episode to hash through the carnival of competing masculinities that was the vice presidential debate that we watched together last night.

That's right.

So we watched it together.

I have my notes here.

I know you took copious notes.

Your notes have already produced a column, which I have not read.

I will read that right after this, but I thought I'd keep myself pure just so that, you know, in case we have some competing analysis.

My notes say that I was particularly impressed with I am a naked bat.

Oh, wait.

That was River jumping around.

The first 15 minutes were a bit of a blur, to be quite honest, before she passed out on the couch.

But

yes, we watched it together.

Adrian's three-year-old daughter, River, went around running and

cavorting and jumping off the couch for the first few minutes of the debate,

which was, I gotta say, a little more dignified than what was happening on stage.

I think so.

My first big takeaway was I was shocked by

how civil and how substantive it was.

And by that, I mean to say that it also drove home for me the absolute hollowness of those categories, right?

So that's not overly, overtly sort of gender-related, but it is, of course, a gendered category, both I think civility and substantiveness, right, as opposed to sort of emotional,

are deeply gendered categories.

They were definitely having the outlines of a far more sort of measured debate, but it did make me realize, like,

are these at all useful categories in this day and age?

Is a candidate really getting into the nitty-gritty of policy positions they have no intention of realizing?

I'm talking about J.D.

Vance,

or policy positions they actively oppose, right?

Is candidates talking with great empathy about people they couldn't in reality give any less of a shit about?

Is that really better than Trump just like, you know, vomiting out the very, very true grievances that are at the heart of their politics?

I feel like we get, for better or for worse, a very genuine sense of who Donald Trump is, including of his particular brand of masculinity.

And it seems to me that what we got with J.D.

Vance was a

very measured, very substantive performance of what a first date with J.D.

Vance would be like before you, the red flags start popping up, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think the red flags were there if you knew what you were looking for.

And as somebody who covers J.D.

Vance and has cultivated, I gotta say, just like a curdling hatred for the guy.

I felt like I could see his agenda coming through.

But something that really struck me about J.D.

Vance was that he was trying to merge the

really kind of like blood and soil populism

and vulkish vision of an American future dominated by a pretty explicit and avowed white patriarchy with the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism that harkens back to like the George W.

Bush era and partakes quite a bit of

sort of the affect of the Christian right.

So this is

a vision of what a Trumpism might look like in the future when it has to divorce itself from Trump's id and from his like carnival-esque sense of

humorous entertainment and become a more coherent political program detached from his personal charisma, right?

So I think we're looking at J.D.

Vance auditioning for 2028.

I was going to say, was this him just standing up being like, I am the oldest boy?

Trying to do Trump's vision of hierarchy enforcement.

Yeah.

without Trump's personality

and the humorous vulgarity that propelled Trump personally to the center of American politics.

So that was a really interesting tension to me.

The other tension, I think, we have our typology on this podcast and we have our three types.

Yeah, you know, our typology of conservative masculinities encompasses three types.

We call the pervert, the preacher, and the creep, with a pervert being sort of the Dave Portnoy,

Hugh Hefner version of like maximalist domineering sexuality, often a Vulgarian, the preacher as being sort of a Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee type of sexual control via enforced chastity and like ostentatious moral uprightness,

and then the creep being a sort of wounded masculinity of resentment at perceived social exclusion and perceived superiority, which is often in the form of like eugenics types, pronatalism tend to fall into the creep zone, which is a very, it's a very popular type of masculinity, often emboldened by figures from Silicon Valley, which of course, J.D.

Vance is a creature of

our local creep factory, Silicon Valley.

You know,

it made me realize that a lot of the creeps we've been talking about, which I think J.D.

Vance sort of falls between those, between two types, the priest and the creep, it highlighted for me how many of the other creeps we deal with on this podcast and who dominate right-wing media and politics, they're carnivales, they're a bit self-defeating.

And here is a guy really delighting in

almost sort of daring, I think, the political press to

kind of point out that he was advocating for stuff that was where he was advocating for the opposite of it on his website while he was speaking, right?

Like, it certainly was more finesse than I had seen from any of the other protagonists of the kind of creep

explosion on the right.

Vance's slickness

and his

dishonest deployment of euphemism and his extremely competent rhetorical performance is why he is going to be said to have won the debate, right?

Which really undermines back to your point about like what does civility mean?

It underlies

what we are looking for when we are looking at these debates and what their object is, right?

Because when you're debating Donald Trump, it is very obvious that what you're doing is not having a conversation.

You are engaging in a domination exercise, right?

I think Kamala Harris understood that very, very well at the September debate, right?

She

baited him, she wounded his ego, she attacked his

not literal, but symbolic virility, right?

She set out to make him seem foolish and small and petty and she succeeded, right?

I think there's something

of that at play in Vance's quote-unquote victory last night, right?

He controlled the conversation.

He controlled the room.

He did a very trumpy

sort of subversion of objective truth and controlled what the controlling truth was of the conversation they were having, right?

That was all dictated on his terms.

In fact, when the moderators tried to intervene with a more like factually grounded account, he sort of protested, whining, said the rules said you guys weren't going to fact check.

Right.

And what he was saying, he was like declaring epistemic authority over the entire conversation, right?

And he did that quite successfully.

And that is a domination exercise in itself, right?

But it's a much more subtle, polite kind of domination masculinity than Trump just like yelling puppet, puppet, no puppet.

they're eating the pets that kind of um like kind of boarish more animalistic version at the same time I do wonder whether whether it ultimately worked right I mean like in some way the the

the working of the refs and the and

the kind of

obsessive and absolutely

well these kind of compulsive and extremely threadbare

uh connections to immigration that he kept trying to sort of create I mean, I do wonder what that reads like.

I mean, I understand it's a big country, and there are many people who probably saw a very different debate than what you and I watched in San Francisco, but it does seem to strike me that in some way

there is still this kind of threadbear quality to it.

And I do wonder to what extent his

pettiness of his grievances still came through.

And I do wonder to what extent Americans find that relatable, right?

The fact that, like, the number one

threat to democracy that he seems to perceive are people getting getting kicked off of Facebook.

It's like, okay, so your Nazi friends got banned.

Like,

I don't know, man.

Like,

I don't know if this connects.

Like, I'm sure, you know, at Twitter headquarters, you know, Elon Musk is like jumping up and down on his mattress, but like, I'm not sure that this is something that,

you know,

Florida swing voters will be like, oh, yeah, that's, that's, that is one of my concerns.

Yeah, I do think that January 6th and the violent riot and and the deaths of five people and the

smearing of feces in the halls of the Capitol and the effective end of the peaceful transfer of power in the US, I do think that's a little more salient than Facebook's moderation policies.

Yeah, right.

Nick Fuentes getting kicked off a social media platform, yeah.

Yeah.

And that speaks to one problem with J.D.

Vance that I do think undermines his

performance of, you know, authoritative competence is that he is so creepy.

And a lot of the things he said, although they were very slickly delivered, they didn't quite make sense, right?

So, like, I wanted to draw attention to the fact that there was a question about housing policy, right?

And Adrian, you mentioned that

JD Vance, like Donald Trump, has like been trying to redirect every question and every issue back into an immigration issue, right?

So when asked about housing, he says, well, mass deportations will reduce demand, right?

It's like, if we simply round up all your neighbors and commit a

huge, violent ethnic cleansing operation,

that will make housing cheaper.

It's like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.

It's like, what if we simply eat the Irish

instead of having to like feed and uplift them?

Yeah.

Except Jonathan Swift was writing satire, right?

And J.D.

Vance is entirely serious.

And that's

weird to me, right?

It doesn't sound like it makes sense.

It partakes of extreme violence

and racism

as a solution for what are like really kind of like dry economic channels or issues, right?

And everything, everything he wants to do, every grievance or problem that the American people face

goes back to

a proposed solution of

like racist mass violence and ethnic cleansing, right?

It's an over-determined concept, we might say, this mass deportation idea.

They're putting a little too much onto the racial grievance that I'm not sure it can actually logically bear.

That's not to undermine or understate the significance of racial grievance to the American id, right?

I think it's like clearly animating a lot of white voters.

The CBS

moderators said that their network's internal polling suggested that a little bit more than 50% of American voters did, in fact, support this mass deportation policy, which is extremely disturbing to me.

Yeah.

But I don't know how far it is going

to play when offered as a solution to these economic concerns, right?

I didn't find it convincing.

But, you know, JD Vance's

persona,

like the fact that we are talking about him more than Tim Walls indicates to me that he won the debate or that he accomplished what he needed to, right?

He dominated the conversation.

He dictated the terms of the conversation.

His lies were delivered very smoothly with an appealing presentation and a lot of kind of imprecise language and euphemism that is deployed to kind of try and make it

obscure the violence of what he's actually talking about.

He reminded me a lot of like corporate speak, you know?

It's like, oh, we are making this new department stronger and going into the new era is what they say when in fact what they're doing is like mass layoffs, right?

Which makes me also wonder about the about the effectiveness of it, frankly.

Like at some point, euphemism, like, you know, if nothing else, neoliberalism really loves a euphemism.

And

people have kind of gotten wise to that language.

And I noticed that too, especially around the abortion question where the record is so obvious.

I mean, we don't necessarily have to belabor it because it's just like, you know, TLDR for those who didn't watch it.

He just was just lying.

It was just the opposite of what he wants, he said, the opposite of who he's concerned with, he claimed to be concerned with.

It just basically, if you were to put a knot at the end of every sentence, you'd get a pretty accurate read of what JD Vance actually believes and wants.

And I mean, I wonder, like, do, do,

I think it was, I think it was pundit bait.

I think it's for people like Ross Douthat and

maybe even David Brooks to sort of hang their hats on.

I don't know if that's who you're playing for at this point, right?

Like, I do think that the people who are coming out in droves to support these

measures to enshrine abortion as a right in state constitutions, whether those people really, well, I mean, if you said it's okay, right?

Like, clearly, they are finely attuned

to how easy it is to take away these rights and how determined one party and not the other appears to be to do that.

So, I'm kind of wondering whether, just straight up,

he was treating it like a culture war issue, which some, especially male pundits, I think, still do.

But I do think the democratic proposition, the democratic party's proposition is ultimately to say, I don't think that people are going to be swayed by

cultural hat tips, right?

Like, oh, we obviously believe in and we obviously want to protect.

Like, no, like, we know what you did, and we know what you intend to continue to do.

But I did want to briefly.

I mean, we have been talking really about J.D.

Vance, and I think you're right that it's a measure that he dominated, which brings me to a question: what the fuck was Tim Walls doing?

Like, what was

that deliberate or was that a fuck-up?

I couldn't tell.

I have one theory.

So, for those who didn't watch it, first of, you know,

you did the right thing.

Second, of,

Walls was extremely agreeable.

I mean, Minnesota and Ice does not begin to cover it.

You know, they kept emphasizing how much they agreed with each other,

which I don't know if you want to go for that if you're talking to, you know, certified freak on a leash J.D.

Vance.

But then I wondered whether the whole thing was a setup

for the big line of the night, right?

Where basically, which I think was the big line of the night, and certainly from looking at sort of pundit analysis right afterwards, they seem to have understood understood it that way too, which was that Walls then turned around and said, Look, I think we've agreed on a lot of things here today, but this is one thing where we're miles apart.

And this was about January 6th.

So, I kind of was wondering whether in debate prep that he had assumed that January 6th would come up earlier and that the break would sort of happen 20 minutes in, as opposed to an hour and 20 minutes in, which I think is where it occurred.

which I think would have made this a lot more effective.

I think it was already still pretty effective.

So, this is the exchange where he said, basically, JD, like, did Donald Trump win or lose the 2020 election?

And then when JD Vance offered a absolutely feely-mouthed non-answer, he called him out and is like, this is a very informative non-answer and kept sort of hammering on that.

I wonder whether basically he misimagined or his handlers misimagined what the overall flow of the questions was going to be.

I think you might be overthinking it, to be honest with you.

I mean, Walls told Harris during his own vetting that he was a bad debater.

He was like, if you pick me, this is not going to go well, this particular media event.

And JD Vance was particularly understood as

a good debater, right?

Because he is the slick corporate Yale law

odious creep.

You know, that is his background is being a greasy salesman.

What it says on the CV.

Don't write to us.

That's just on the CV.

Yeah.

He's been injured in an accident.

Do you want an obvious creep representing it called 1-800JD?

And Tim Walls'

appeal, right, is that he doesn't do this thing.

This is part of his pitch.

I think the Harris campaign has been wildly underutilizing Walls' authenticity

and his

conspicuous

unsavviness

in the Washington

professional dishonesty style, right?

Tim Walls is bad at getting on a debate stage and lying, and I think that reflects well on him morally, right?

It also really goes to what this debate really was to me, which was the competing visions of post-Trump white masculinity, right?

There is the JD dance style, which is incredibly domineering and prescriptive about sexuality and about family life,

that is incredibly hostile to women's equality and dignity in the public sphere, right?

And then there is the Walls vision, which tries to really position itself as a purveyor of homespun goodwill and common sense, right?

And so, in a way, Walls being unable

to

compete on these terms is kind of a symptom of the other things that he's better at, right?

I think that they are underutilizing those things that he's good at.

I mean, I don't think I should say that.

I don't think before people write to us, I don't think he had a badly.

I wanted to push back a little on your characterization because I think he got some really good zingers in, particularly on abortion and on health care, right?

Because this is where he was excellent at distilling the honest truth or the reality of what J.D.

Vance was like spinning hot air around, right?

He was like, Look, you want to talk about quote-unquote giving women more options while you're taking away their options.

You want to talk about states' rights and their having different standards in different states, but states do insane stuff, which is why Amber Thurman died in Georgia.

He said, if she was living in Minnesota, where I'm governor, she would be alive.

And that is true, right?

He said, human rights, control of your over your own body cannot be dependent on geography, right?

That is a good answer.

He explained the stakes.

He called out a real human being as opposed to Vance's creepy

talk about his friend who had an abortion when she was in an abusive relationship,

which tried to signal his empathy, but also he didn't really explain that the laws he supports and his previous statements about abusive relationships in the past would have both deprived her of that opportunity to have the abortion, would have compelled her to carry her abuser's child, and if he had his drothers, he would have encouraged her to stay with her abuser, not just through the trapping of being tied to him with a kid, but by his moral vision of such relationships as having to be permanent, right?

He opposes no-fault divorce, for instance, and has previously stated that women

in abusive relationships should remain in them.

So, you know,

he could have gone further.

I think Waltz could have gotten a lot further on that answer, but he made the stakes very clear.

And something else happened on healthcare, where the Trump plan is effectively to reverse the incredibly popular Affordable Care Act.

It's one of our vagaries of our politics that the Affordable Care Act is popular when you call it the Affordable Care Act and unpopular when you call it Obamacare.

But it's the same thing.

We do live in the dumbest country.

We live in the dumbest country in the world.

But the Trump proposal for healthcare, and in fact, what he tried to do when he was the president was overturn the ACA and particularly

get rid of the ACA's most popular reform, which is say that insurance companies have to cover you, even if you have a pre-existing condition, right?

The proposal is to create functionally two separate healthcare markets, one for healthy people and one for sick people that's way more expensive, right?

And Walls really distilled that.

He made that clear.

He's like, if you have asthma, if you're a little older, if you're a woman, all of this means it's going to be be dramatically more expensive to you.

I thought that was really clear, right?

So the advantage of Waltz being honest is that when he has a good answer for things, he can contrast his honest and directness

with Vance's obfuscation, euphemism, and bullshit, right?

I think those moments, you're right, came a little too late in the debate, right?

Because most of the people who are watching were sort of tuning out by the second half of the debate, which is when Waltz really gained a lot more confidence and got a lot of these more

pointed replies in.

But the good news is that a lot of that stuff's going to be clipped

and

like put all over social media and probably in some ads, right?

So, you know, it's a lot of it will depend on whether people understand

JD Vance

as

a slick personal injury lawyer type, or like used car salesman who's lying to you,

or whether they kind of buy it and think his dominance and his sense of self-assurance and his control over the conversation represents the kind of masculinity that they relate to and want to put into positions of leadership.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth also thinking about

who exactly was the imagined audience here.

And so I should say, I think yesterday we sort of said at the beginning, like, God, this has the exact same trajectory as the Harris-Trump debate, and that, like, yeah,

clear nerves, clear insecurities at the beginning with the Democratic, with the Democratic candidate, and then with abortion, it sort of turns on a dime.

Now, Harris was able to sustain that and just kind of clobbered Trump.

And

Walls just didn't.

bait uh jd vance really until that very end when you could tell he could do it and and um but at the same time you're right Like, the, the strengths of, of, um, Walls' performance also seemed always struck me as aimed at guys kind of like him, right?

This was an older pitch.

The JD Vance pitch was they're kicking people off Facebook, right?

Which is like, again, if you're like 38 and your first wife just left, you're like, yeah, that's a big issue for you, right?

Like,

but like, yeah, your diabetes, your, you know, your retirement, your housing, the appeal was to people in their 50s and 60s in swing states.

And that may well be, you know, the more effective strategy.

Like, I think that there are some Republican constituencies where I'm sure Vance's stock will be now rising.

If I was to think about watching this in the villages in Florida, I imagine that Walls might have walked away with it, right?

Because as you say, the stuff that people

really are...

are fired, that they really care about, he was able to be much stronger on.

And I agree with you that on abortion it just really helps it's not even how they talk about it it's the fact that their passion is so obviously genuine jd gance does not give a about these women dying and walls was upset he was upset about school shootings he was upset about about women uh dying dying from preventable um diseases during pregnancy because they were being denied access to abortion right like

It's hard to fake that.

But it's also something that democratic politicians use to fake all the time.

And I think it's a huge asset that neither of these two people appear to have to fake it.

They're just, they are genuinely incensed, they're genuinely upset, and so are we.

And I do think that's a really effective thing.

It's also, I think,

I mean, it's a weird thing for a gender scholar to say, but kind of an ungendered category, right?

Like this kind of like, this isn't right,

right?

That kind of

knee-jerk indignation almost, right?

Like, it can be heavily masculinized, it can be you know, kind of a care economy, more sort of feminized gesture in our society, but really it's a place where we can where a lot of people can meet, right?

Like a grandfather can have this as much as a 17-year-old, right?

Like they can meet in that concern and in that immediate, like, this doesn't feel right.

So, I do wonder whether, you know, in the end, given how big it's, you know, it's a very divided country, but it's also a big country, and whether Walls,

with that performance, didn't pick up more people that he still needed than Vance did.

Yeah, this is really interesting to me, the difference between like morality and moralizing, right?

Because

moral outrage or moralized offense is maybe what I'm really talking about, has long been the

realm of the right, right?

Especially on these culture war issues, right?

Yeah, including on abortion, right?

Like, it's not a choice, it's a child.

And now the politics have changed because there's a tremendous amount of human suffering, right?

It is the pro-choice side that gets to talk about specific people who are being harmed.

And it is the anti-choice side that has to get

on the back foot talking about abstract principle, about states' rights, about trying to give mothers more choices while they are in fact taking those choices away, right?

He meant the choice to stay home because all the other choices have been removed from you is what he was talking about.

Right, right.

The women who choose to put on the red gowns and the white hats come back to the Gulu show should get to do that.

There is like sort of a moral change that has followed Dobbs, right?

The hurt, the outrage that used to belong entirely to these hypothetical fetuses is now belonging to actual living, breathing people with names and sentient experiences of the world and investments and dreams in their lives a lot like you and me, right?

And that is much more powerful, I think, than the abstract fetus.

And it is entirely on the Democrat side.

The other thing that I'm really interested in about is Waltz's style of masculinity, right?

You talk about this as being kind of an ungendered category.

Waltz is trying to reclaim.

a caregiving outrage, an outrage on behalf of the more vulnerable who are being hurt as a style of masculinity, right?

As opposed to J.D.

Vance's style of masculinity, which is claiming the power to determine who's hurt matters.

Yeah, exactly.

That seems exactly right.

And it's a different

mode for the Democrats, right?

They haven't really been doing this before.

And you're not really seeing many models of the Walls-style masculinity elsewhere, right?

I think it's partly because politics self-selects away from people who give a shit about anybody else, right?

This is what makes Walls unique, and I think his

virtue for the ticket is in seeming like somebody you know who is kind to you, who values the things you value, who has more experiences like you have, who's not a product of these, you know,

extraction machines like venture capital and Yale Law.

He seems a lot more salt salt of the earth, a lot more recognizable, and his claim of those values doesn't lend itself to a publicized debate because that is a domination exercise.

It's not a shared morality exercise.

He tried to change it into a shared morality exercise later in the debate.

Waltz did.

He had limited success.

And I think those successes.

should be milked for all they're worth, but I think he'll do better if they just put him out among people, put him in non-hostile TV settings, you know, like have him do more media and be shown

being this grandfatherly Midwestern figure that can contrast with how,

you know,

Vance's origin story that he leans into so much and that he told several times on the base stage last night despite it like three times.

It's supposed to ground him.

We get it.

You wrote a whole book about it.

Well, it's supposed to ground him in the authenticity of his previous poverty, right?

But he doesn't have that anymore.

He's so much

a product of these elite institutions.

And he seems culturally very alien

in a way that Waltz does not.

And I think they should lean into that.

Yeah, I thought, so this is an interesting point.

I think that there were a couple of, and I'm sorry if I'm like trying to like

sort of over scrutinize what was happening or what the strategy might have been.

I thought there were a couple of places where the aweshucks kind of, you know,

as you say, the kind of reliable care care masculinity that Walls was projecting

was used.

He used it to bait J.D.

Vance, but J.D.

Vance, to his very limited credit, didn't rise to it, right?

I thought that it was a little funny that Walls mentioned his service in the,

what is it, the National Guard.

I think that was bait to get to basically get J.D.

Vance to accuse him of stolen valor.

He's a real man.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And to be like, look, I served in the best way I could, right?

Like,

he was setting him up.

There were a couple of moments where I thought he was hoping that JD Vance might sort of pick at this and kind of, yeah, and kind of put him in his place in this kind of domination ritual, but in ways that would be visible to a broader audience.

It was, and this is what makes, I think, Vance a more advanced form of the creep.

He spotted it and didn't go for it.

Yeah, I think there is a degree to which Vance has a lot more self-control than Trump does, right?

He is smarter than Trump in a lot of ways.

Trump has a unique sort of Teflon quality where the power of his id is seen to give him an authenticity even when he's lying all the time.

But Vance doesn't have that, right?

Vance's control, I think, self-control can make him seem inauthentic.

He reminds me a little bit of Hillary Clinton that way, actually.

I was going to say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's funny, right?

Like we talked about this when we talked about Kamala Harris in our

Kamala Harris in our first episode

when Biden withdrew.

And

this is a kind of

a, this is an undisciplined democratic ticket in all the right ways.

They're both messy people.

They're both real people.

And

yeah, I do wonder what happens when you send like...

JD Vance, noted android, into the midst of this, right?

Like every three other people in this context has you mean Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walls.

They're just like, they're odd.

They're just like, they're people you recognize.

They're recognizable types, but they're not, they're messy, they're imperfect.

I agree with you that Vance might well fall victim to the Hillary curse, ironically enough.

That like here we see that there is also such a thing as a man who is the man who is too self-controlled, who feels a robotic because he

is

too deliberate in his affected regulation and in his rhetoric.

You know, I think there are some ways in which that could go wrong.

You know, since through August and September, what I think are the

more controlled, more polished,

more risk-averse elements of the Democratic Party have really seeped control of the Harris Walls ticket and have sort of tamped down on its its irreverent, messy fun quality that it had in those first few weeks.

I also think that, you know, as Israel

invades and bombs every country in its region,

gender and the

salience of masculinity to the role of commander-in-chief could work against Kamala Harris.

But, you know, there, I think you've got a point that there is something appealing about their messiness and distrustful about

Vance's self-control.

And we'll just see how it all plays out over these next

shockingly few days until this election finally happens.

Well, thank you so much for talking me and talking our listeners through this.

And people should check out Maura's.

column, which I have not read, but which I will now read and see

what else I missed.

But

thank you so much.

And

as always, we are, whether we like it or not, in Bed with the Right.

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

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Calfis.