Has Optimism Become Cringe? (with Chris Hayes)

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I'm John Lovett and joining me today, he's the host of All In on MSNBC and the podcast, Why Is This Happening? Chris Hayes, thank you for being here. Oh, it's a delight to be here.
Thank you for having me. Let's just jump in.
Donald Trump took a break from winning golf tournaments and doing scam IPOs to hit the campaign trail, holding events in both Michigan and Wisconsin during his event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Trump, per usual, focused on immigration.
Let's take a listen. The 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal.
The Democrats say, please don't call them animals. They're humans.
I said, no, they're not humans. They're not humans.
They're animals. And Nancy Pelosi told me that.
She said, please don't use the word animal, sir, when you're talking about these people. I said, I'll use the word animal because that's what they are.
And we have all the law enforcement behind. They're going to be watching what happens to this thug.
He's not going to get away with it. So many people get away with it.
They say, well, let him go. Let him go.
I'm the only one that has to put up a bond. You know, I put up a bond.
I didn't do anything wrong. I had to put up a bond this morning for $175 million.
I did nothing wrong. They can shoot somebody, kill somebody and walk out of jail an hour later.
How about that? Do you think that's a fair policy? That's, that's called radical left. Okay.
Now, uh, going on there. Yeah, There's a lot going on there.
All right. Now, according to a recent AP poll, about two thirds of Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of the border, including four in 10 Democrats.
I also thought this was telling when asked unprompted, immigration is the number one issue on voters' minds, according to Gallup. But how do you separate the way in which there is a serious issue at the borders worthy of voters concern and attention from the way in which an entire right wing media system has basically turned the crisis into a kind of political step and repeat for them to exploit across a variety of issues? Well, I guess the first thing I would say is it's been depressingly effective, the step and repeat.
I mean, they know what they're doing. One sort of asterisk I'd add to that polling is that I think it's either in the Gallup or Pew polling, one of these entities that does repeated polling.
The primacy of the economy has gone down considerably, particularly among Republicans. So six months ago, Republicans were like, the economy is the biggest thing.
And what's happened is the economy has gotten better. So now they don't want to talk about the economy.
And so the salience has totally switched. And if you consume any right wing media, like I cannot overstate the monomania in right wing media about about this, about, you know, the border and about, quote unquote, migrant crime.
Like, I mean, really, it's just I think an effect. It has been an effective propaganda effort.
Yeah. In the in the same Gallup poll from March, this was the order of top concerns.
Crime and violence beat the economy, health care, drug use, the deficit, social security and the environment. You know, I'm in I'm in L.A.
We saw a double digit drop in violent crime in 2023. There's a trend across the country.
There was a precipitous decline in homicides, in violent crime, most types of property crime. And yet 77% of Americans believe there is more crime now than a year ago.
55% know you hope like, okay, that's people say, you know, that, oh, you know, things, New York is crazy. What's happening in San Francisco.
My goodness, that place is crazy, but not in my community. I don't see it, but wow, the country's going to hell in a handbasket.
But 55% say that about their own community. That roughly matches the Gallup surveys from the 1990s when crime was objectively, objectively far, far worse than it is right now.

So Trump is obviously both feeding this and feeding off of this dynamic.

He obviously is doing this classic technique of finding terrible, heinous crimes committed by immigrants and exploiting them.

He's also doing that in an ad.

I know you think a lot about how people are getting or not

getting information. You were a local reporter back in the day.
How do you explain this disconnect between crime vibes and crime rates? It's a really good question. I don't have a great explanation of it.
I mean, I do think that I think there's a few things. One, I do think there's, Again, there's a propaganda campaign.

That propaganda campaign has been very effective. There's always going to be an incentive to cover incidents of violence and mayhem in the local news.
It's the lifeblood of local news. It always has been.
It is going to give people a skewed sense of overall incident rates. What's strange when you compare the border stuff to the crime stuff in the case of the border, like it really has been the case that there were a number of months there were record setting amount of people really were showing up at the border.
So like there was an actual tangible phenomenon. You can talk about what was driving that or what the best way to deal with it.
The crime thing is really driving me insane. And we hit this on the show all the time.
Here are the facts about crime. Violent crime, particularly the most serious violent crime, a homicide spiked at an unprecedented level under President Donald Trump.
Last year, it fell at what appears to be a record-setting level under Joe Biden. It spiked under Donald Trump, the law and order president.
It has declined under Joe Biden, the Democratic president. If you tell people this, they refuse to believe you.
And I honestly, I'm like, I'm a little at my wits end about the whole thing. And again, my kid takes a subway every day.
OK, my kid takes a subway every day. I take this away.
Like it's not these are not like remote concerns to me. They're real concerns.
I'm a New Yorker. I went to I commuted to school as a 12 year old every day in the early 1990s when homicides were almost 10x what they've been.

So, like, I know it's real.

It's real.

The threat to your physical security, the fear of crime.

This is not like nonsense.

People do really worry about it.

And it's totally fair and right to worry about it.

But the proportions and the perception have gotten utterly untethered from reality.

Well, so, right. I mean, the question is, like, how do you what changed? Right.
So, you know, there's been a right wing ecosystem for some time. If it bleeds, it leads has been.
Yeah. It was not invented by social media or Newsmax.
There is something that is definitely the link between reality and people's experience has frayed in some way. I agree.
I got two theses on these. One is that is the Eric Kleinenberg, who just got a great book out now about the pandemic called 2020.
I do think a lot of it's like the the intense disruption and the hangover of the dislocation disruption that was the COVID experience and the trauma it produced and the social dislocation, which did actually produce an increase in violence and an increase in disorder and an increase in crime and an increase of untreated acute mental illness because clinics were closed. People were like all that stuff really happened.
People really did experience that. And there's a little bit of a lag of the experience, the processing and the feeling like the nose is coming up like that.
So I think there's a little bit of that. And then I think the information environment has totally degraded.
So I just think that like, I have no idea where people are getting their information about the world from, but it has become more obscure and opaque behind sort of like the black box of algorithms, particularly younger voters under 35. A lot of it's coming from TikTok.
And some of it's great. Like, I like TikTok.
There's great stuff on TikTok. People make smart and interesting points the way they do on anything.
And there's smart people doing stuff on YouTube. But I just have noticed, and I don't know if you've noticed this, a real uptick in the incidence of like the normies in my life saying stuff where you're like, wait, what? What did you just say? Where'd that come from? So I think those two things, I think the fact that there really was disruption and it takes a long time for people to like metabolize that.
And also the kind of fracturing of the information environment have combined to create this kind of like insanely persistent sense of bad vibes. Yeah.
That, that is to me the sort of central, it's really the central issue. No, it is.
Because, right, there was just people, there was a, during the pandemic, there really was a spike in crime that was terrible. There was also just, we were disconnected from each other.
But we are now years... No, I know.

The fear that the crime rate

would keep going up, right?

Basically that like...

Was a real fear.

I had it.

We all had it.

We all had it.

The wheels were coming off,

that this was it,

that things were just going to descend.

Totally, yeah.

But there is an optimistic story

to be told.

Yes, extremely.

But there's no equity.

There's no equity in telling it, right?

Like there's, first of all, there's obviously Joe Biden is too smart to go out there and say, actually, crime is not as bad as you think it is. Vote for me, right? That's, there's no, that's not exactly a winning argument when you have Trump out there doing kind of 1930s style kind of bloody anecdotes.
Yeah. And so you end up in a situation where, you know, Trump makes his news where Trump makes his news with these speeches.
He really enjoys the fact that he can say, oh, I'm going to call them animals, but the left is afraid to call them animals. He plays that game.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden today is doing a healthcare event with Bernie Sanders, right? That's how we talk past each other right now. But stepping back, you see this sort of pessimism across a range of issues, right? Pessimism performs really well online.
Cynicism does really well online. And it's hard to figure out the cause and effect.
But there's also this dynamic in which being pessimistic is how you prove that you're not captured, right? That having a negative take is how you show that you really

get it. And I, and I don't know what to do with that.
It's my most, I don't know what to do with the fact that optimism has become cringe, which maybe just because I'm old and I've become cringe. Yeah.
Yeah. But, but like, I'm in the same boat.
I'm in the same boat. Like where there there has to be some there has to be a way to make an argument at a progressive optimist's case in politics, not just for Joe Biden, but just for progressive values, for a progressive worldview that things can get better.
Because otherwise, you know, if patriotism belongs to the fascists and optimism belongs to the, you know, the tech bros, What do we got? What are we offering? I totally – yeah. We're singing from the same hymnal here and I think it might also be generation.
Like we might just be like equally middle-aged and cringe. And again, I try to check myself in this because like there are tangible material aspects of American life right now that are really rough.
Like the two biggest ones, like housing costs are again, I always it's important to sort of check back in of like data anecdote, like synthesizing all that. So like housing costs are crushing people right now.
And and and the combination of the fact that higher interest rates have really sort of frozen the housing market, which makes people's entrance in the housing market really, really hard. And rents have really gone up.
And there's a real acute housing problem. And housing is the biggest cost people have.
So there's some empirical material stuff happening there. But I also agree with you that like the nature of the tenor of the conversation about public life that exists online, which is increasingly where conversations about public life take place, just like a plant growing towards light, they inevitably stretch towards the negative.
And it has a really, I think, an insidious political effect that is not just an insidious political effect, oh, it's bad for Joe Biden's approval ratings, about the vision of building a better future that has to be essentially the lifeblood of any project of the left or liberalism. One way I think that I find myself realizing that, oh, I'm, if not pessimistic, I am not imaginatively optimistic in that I don't, I spend a lot of my days really zooming in on how we survive and win in a 50- nation.
Yeah. But I spend much less of my time thinking, what is the path out of a dynamic in which the stakes of every presidential election feel total? Yeah.
Where the where we have a where we basically have a politics in which we have a Biden administration, which is deserves a ton of criticism on a whole host of levels, but on a variety on domestic policy, certainly has been incredibly successful on every measure you could have, given the cards he was dealt versus a doddering, corrupt, fascistic old man. you know and and we know going in like god it's probably going to come down to about 3 000 people outside of madison and it's like well that's a huge fucking problem it shouldn't we know it shouldn't i don't know what to do with it either i mean i agree that i sort of deal with the structural i mean i i keep having faith in persuasion i do have faith in time healing some wounds like i do think that there's a huge lag on this stuff.
And I do think that I do think as this may sound cringe or this may sound excessively internet coded, but I do think like the model of unprocessed trauma is actually very important, important and useful and understanding of American life after COVID. Cause you could be like, well, it happened three years ago and it's like, well, yeah, but that's the thing about trauma, right? Like it does, it's not just, it doesn't just go away.
And particularly when it's not dealt with it, it comes out in all sorts of different ways. So I, I do have some faith in like the forward trajectory.
I do have the faith in, in, in, in persuasion. The thing that I really don't have, and this is another thing that I've, I've, I've started to feel like an old man about i really have is is the information environment i just i truly do not know it's harder and harder for me just to mentally model how the modal swing state independent voter gets their information about the world so when we talk about like the economic policy that has been the biden economic policy which has been incredibly like uh successful i saw a chart actually comparing it to the recovery after the great recession and it's like in in sort of redistributive terms been incredible like the the the real term wealth of the bottom three quintiles have grown tremendously and they all fell during the recovery of the great recession so but the question of like of like, well, who knows that? Even on the even I mean, I do this on my show.
You said Biden's smart enough to do it, but I do it on my show. I just go up in front of a graph and I'm like, crime went up under Donald Trump and it's going down under Joe Biden.
Like, please share this. This is this is a fact we need to know.
Oil production is higher than it's ever been in the history of any country on Earth. This is just a fact about what's happened.
Now, you can say that's bad because it's bad for the climate. You could say it's great because it's keeping oil prices down.
But what you can't say is, god damn those liberals, they're not pumping up oil. No, I know.
And it really is. It is hard to.
It's like it's self. It's such a vicious circle, right? Because if you're somebody who's saying housing costs, they are the biggest problem in my life right now.
And there are people out there saying, well, we need to do these kinds of rent controls. We need to do these kinds of ways to take away power from landlord.
We need these kinds of subsidies, all things that are important. But what we need is a national program to build vast amounts of housing to make up for the generation that failed to do that, right? And if you have no idea that Joe Biden was able to pass a massive infrastructure bill, if you have no idea that Joe Biden passed the biggest climate investments in history, if you have no idea about all these ways in which government has been able to succeed, maybe not in a way that is tangible yet, but actually passing big pieces of legislation.
Why on earth would you be optimistic if someone says, I see what your problem is, and here's how we can solve it over the next five, 10 years? Or even understanding where the positions are. We've launched this new thing on my podcast, Why Is This Happening, called The Stakes.
And we've got the first one coming out next week, which is about immigration. And one of the things I'm obsessed with, which gets exactly this point, is it's even more concrete than that.
And here's why. For the first time since 1892, two guys running against each other that both served as president.
So usually one of the people has some speculative vision of what they'll do. Yeah.
While one of the people has a record. In this case.
They both have records. You can literally just be like, what did HUD look like under President Donald Trump? What did he do on housing? What did he do on on immigration? What did he do? Like, there are concrete records.
And one of the things we're trying to do on this new series, the stakes is like we just did this on immigration is to be like, it's not rhetorical. It's not speculative.
They actually both wielded the power of the state. They both have records and you can actually talk about that.
And that to me is an enormous missing part of this information environment, which is like Donald Trump was not a friend of building more housing. Joe Biden actually has been pro building more housing.
Like they do actually have records here and they're actually quite different. Yeah.
It, it, it feels like we're at the, the like kind of logical conclusion of a process that started a long time ago, you know, cable news. I mean, you know, Jon Stewart goes on, on cable news and says, stop hurting America.
Right. And it had this feeling of, Hey, there's, there's too much coverage of the horse race and not enough on the substance.
There's too much of the icing. There's not enough cake.
And we're still just talking about cake. That process continued.
And now there's basically, there was a story about Joe Biden waking up every morning and watching Morning Joe. And I was like, God, that's quaint.
That makes me feel a little bit better. Wouldn't it be nice if Morning Joe was as important as it used to be? The national gathering place that was once Morning Joe where we knew everybody was watching, right? And this podcast series, it is something people need to know.
But if you're gonna plausibly say, all right, this is to be a value. No, no, I'm not saying, look, obviously, I believe personally that the future hinges on how many people listen to the stakes on the why is this happening feed.
That has been my proposition from the beginning. But no, but we feel this here, right? Like the person listening, if you're listening to this podcast, I hope it's your first episode.
Probably not. You're trying to, you're You locked in.
You're locked in. You're locked the fuck in.
But no, but you're, you responded to chaotic, confusing, overwhelming times by trying to dig in a little bit and try to make sense of it, understand it. Some people gave, got incredibly connected.
You know, there are a lot of people out there whose phone screens haven't really locked since like November of 2016, right? They're just in it. and then there's millions upon millions upon millions of people that just tuned it all out right and so the hope for your a show that's giving people that's arming people with that information is presumably most of those people have pretty well formed solid views of the world but that they will be armed with data and information to go out there and talk to other or even to be like your friend and friend and be like, because there are people there, you know, it's such a spectrum.
And there are people who don't really know what, you know, don't don't know that. Here's a great example.
I don't know that actually Trump's administration was pretty hostile to like a new building and the conservative movement has been particularly, you know, they took out Kathy Hochul's attempts in New York State to do this, like Tucker Carlson demagogued about it. Joe Biden's actually been very, like, forward leaning on this, particularly in the last month he's been.
So just the basics of that, like, actually, I know this is important to you. Here's where they stand.
You know, the iconic version of this is the interview with the voter in one of the Nate Cohn, you know, the supplements to a Nate Cohn poll in New York Times who blamed Biden for the overturn of Roe because it happened while he was president. And it's like, right, if you're not that checked in, like, that's not a crazy idea.
I mean, obviously, to someone that understands why that happens and in a more granular sense, it's like it is a little crazy. But again, if you're not that checked in, then you're, you know, oh, it happened under him.
He must have done it. So even at the basic level of like being able to share with people, you know, because it's true, like everyone is an emissary for this information, particularly in a world in which the information environment is viral and social.
Right. Like people are learning stuff from stuff other people sent them as their primary means of learning stuff.
So you are the person that sends people stuff for someone in your life, right? Like, like, you know, there's something optimistic, I guess, at that, or at least like, it feels like you could do something useful with that. Hey, all, I'm Jamie Lynn Sigler, a mom, actor, and advocate.

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I believe you talked about this with Ben Smith about the media that when you were a local reporter, you would be the only journalist in the room covering an alderman stuffing money in his pockets, I assume. But you were the conduit, right? If you weren't there, what happened in that room wouldn't be public.
But because you were there, you reported it, it might get out to people. All those local institutions are dead or dying.
But at the same time, every person in that room is a reporter now. And I feel like so much of what we're talking about is the ways in which that has made everything worse.
But very little of that conversation is about the ways in which it can potentially, right? Like if people truly take their responsibility as sort of like emissaries to each other more seriously in a world without news, maybe that is a place where I don't know. There's some there's some way in which we can kind of inform each other.
Yeah. I mean, that's the hope.
But I agree. I think one of the things that we've seen to circle back to where we started of like, why is there this disconnect, particularly on crime and violence? Like, why is this disconnect here? And we've had these disconnects before.
We should say that, you know, people thinking that crime has gone up in the last year when it's gone down has happened before. That this sort of, yes, the kind of social viral sense of information that creates this kind of like buzzy mood in people about what's going on that can get increasingly detached from some more rigorous method of delivering the information about what's going on, I think is a huge part of it.
And again, we could all play a role in correcting that. Yeah, I do also.
It's also that like, does that lend itself You know, are we playing in on the is that the home turf of the right in some sense? Well, this this is why the I think that what you saw with Trump yesterday in Michigan and the kind of lurid tales of, you know, horrific crimes is so, you know, they understand what they're doing.

You know, it's a little like the I think it was from the Onion book with the eight 1980s

campaign of like Jimmy Carter, like, let's talk better mileage was his slogan.

And Ronald Reagan's was kill the bastards.

And like, there's a little bit of, you know, to go back to Biden today in the White House,

like we're bringing the cost of inhalers down $11 an inhaler.

And it's like blood will run through the streets unless you elect me. That there's a little bit of that.
And there's a reason to talk to your point about turf. I think it's actually been a confounding thing for Democrats to figure out how to have this conversation precisely because it's been framed in such a gross and demagogic way that Democrats have really struggled to take it head on.
I think people have tried in different ways. I think Chris Murphy's done some interesting stuff on this.
But again, I don't think anyone's quite come out. No one's making the affirmative case on the other side of why immigration is actually good and why immigrants are good and why it's good for the country and why it makes us better and all of the things it brings.
And so it's – I think that conversation has gotten completely asymmetrical. Yeah, well – and yet like in that same AP poll that shows two-thirds of voters are deeply concerned about the border crisis, there are still a majority of Americans who on the whole see immigration as a net good, not Republican, net benefit.
They have concerns, but they believe they take pride in an identity of America as a nation of immigrants. Democrats used to have a way of talking about this, right? Barack Obama, I worked on those speeches, would say America is a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.
We have to enforce our laws so that we can be a welcoming place, right? Like there is a language that has been built up over time that is the most popular position on this issue.

Like that was the consensus bipartisan from Marco Rubio to George W. Bush to Lindsey Graham

and John McCain to Barack Obama and all kinds of Democrats.

There was that consensus and that does still exist.

But right now, because of, I think, the media coverage of the border, there's just no space

for that other half of the conversation.

Yeah, I mean, the media coverage of the border, there's just no space for that other half of the conversation. Yeah.
I mean, can I do a quick riff on this? Because I've been thinking about about this a lot. So we've seen very powerful anti-immigration politics across the developed world, across all of OECD and in other places.
I mean, there's been migrant backlash in Colombia directed at Venezuela. Keep in mind, whenever we complain about how many people are showing up here, like there's like 2 million Venezuelans who showed up in Colombia per capita, which is just would be an insane, catastrophic crisis with our politics here.
Usually the countries that are dealing with these kinds of situations are neighboring countries to places that are in intense and acute distress. Why are immigration politics so universal and why they've been so successful? And here I think is a key thing.
If you do them right, what's great about them as politics is that you can make the other, the them, a group that doesn't vote. So other kinds of ways that you might think of dividing a nation to play culture war politics, gay folks.
Well, you know, gay folks, well, gay folks vote and gay folks have family members who vote and they have parents and they have kids and they have aunts and uncles. And it turned out after enough time, you couldn't do that anymore because enough of those people accreted together to say, we don't like this.
And you ended up with a smaller half of the country. If you direct your ire at people who by definition are not citizens and you do it smartly enough, there's a vision of binding together a pretty broad coalition of people, even across lines of race.
Yeah. To say those people there are the problem.
And if we stop them and we direct our ire at them and we unleash all hell and fury on them, everything will get better for us. And it has the advantage of the them not being able to vote.
Yeah. And I do think Democrats had a bunch of assumptions.
Actually, some Republicans did too. The Republican autopsy that led Marco Rubio to embrace immigration reform made this assumption too, which is that embracing comprehensive immigration reform is a way to appeal to Hispanic voters.
But then you see in this poll, in all these polls, this crosses the racial lines, that there's a broad concern about the border. I was actually thinking about something similar you know you talked to

you concern about the border. I was actually thinking about something similar.
You talked to Judith Butler about trans issues and gender. I'm going to tie it back.
It'll make sense in a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But about, and you posed a rhetorical question, which you actually didn't end up answering in that conversation, which is, why are Republicans so focused on this? There's inflation. There's crime to demagogue.
There's the economy. There's healthcare.
There's all these other issues. And yet a swimmer saying they didn't get a medal in some event they were supposed to get applause people on their feet.
And it does seem like Republicans have always found that there was money to be made in moralizing or demonizing some group of people, but they don't do the Murphy Brown thing anymore. There are too many rich gay Republicans and too many gay people in this country now.
And it feels as though they've got an itch that they need to scratch, right? They need a small enough group of people to demonize and demonize in a way that appeals to people's sense of cultural change. And that leads them to this very small group of people who they only recently- With very little power.
Very little power. Let's be clear.
Very little power. But I was wondering if you have any other kind of what you sort of – why you think this issue of trans rights has become such an important one on the right.

So I think it's interesting also to compare these two, right?

Because I think you're right.

The mechanics are similar.

They understand that their sort of best ground is a kind of us versus them where them are the vanguard of some form of threatening cultural change, whether that's immigrants showing up at the border or trans people showing up at your kids' swim meet.

OK, and it's also the case that in both those cases, there's a mathematical logic to the folks at the border who can't vote or to a tiny, vanishingly small fraction of American life, which are trans folks. What's interesting to me is I don't think it's all that calculating.
So I think part of the trans stuff is it freaks a lot of people out who have conservative values on gender hierarchy because it is a threat to conservative gender hierarchy, which was part of the point I was making with Butler. I think they and I have slightly different views on this.
I think they think that it doesn't need to be a threat in some ways. And I think it sort of inescapably is.
And they're not misunderstanding the degree to which it does threaten sort of gender hierarchies. But what's also interesting to compare is how successful the immigration stuff has been and how much a flop the trans stuff has been and why that is.
And I think this has to get this gets back to an interesting question about what you talked about. There's an accrued language for Democrats, how much brand capital and reputational trust on issues built up over time matters.
And I think basically you've got a situation in which the public broadly is more inclined to trust Democrats on issues of LGBTQ stuff and more inclined to trust Republicans on immigration stuff. And I think that brand equity has meant in some degree you've seen very different outcomes for in some ways parallel attempts to kind of pick some small group and go after them.
One of which has not actually been that politically successful to the point where it's been a little bit abandoned mid game. Yeah.
They're not hammering it the hammering it the way they were in 2022. DeSantis's attempts to remember DeSantis's whole thing was he was going to get to the right of Donald Trump on trans issues.
Whereas the immigration stuff has been obviously incredibly fruitful for them politically. And they are a thousand percent committed to it, almost to the exclusion of other things at this point.
Yeah. No, it's interesting.
I agree with you. It's I agree with both points seem to be somewhat intention, which is just to go wide with it.
Like, yes, like trans liberation is actually also going to liberate Ben Shapiro from the from the from the burdens masculinity are placing on him. Right.
Like, I believe that, like that. I agree.
I believe that too, yeah. That freeing us of assumptions around gender, gender as a performance, this is actually, it's actually, it hits people deeply because it reaches something that is a weight every single person is carrying.
So they are right when they raise these concerns that being open to trans acceptance is a path to a broader demolition of assumptions on gender. But at the same time, it also does seem to be a flop.
And what my concern there is, is are we missing something? Which is, has issues, especially around sports and trans people, been a means of bringing in younger men who feel as though the left has attacked their understanding of gender and their understanding of their own role and their good qualities without offering them a replacement, right? Like they think they're supposed to be strong and tough and they're not very comfortable expressing themselves and they do want to hit on women at bars, whatever the the thing is on the right right like i don't know what straight people do i've never honestly you're the first one i've talked to in over fucking weeks but but but like a straight other than john and tommy obviously hit on women in bars that's right no for sure but but that like this is almost like a shibboleth for like the joe rogan world to get yeah disaffected or less political men in the door. I think that's – it's probably been successful in that way.
And I do think there's some evidence in the data of this bifurcation and the ideological identification of young people along gender lines that women are becoming more liberal. It looks mostly like women are becoming more liberal while men are not as opposed to getting more reactionary.
But again, there's, there's an actual interesting debate about what that data say. I do think part of it is that, and I do think there's a real question there.
I, this gets back to the information environment situation where, I mean, I just feel like there's the algorithmic logic of, I see it myself. I'm 45 years old and I like to like lift weights every day.
and I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I, I just feel like there's the algorithmic logic of, I see it myself. I'm 45 years old and I like to lift weights every day.
And by the way, you're a beast. Thank you, John.
The algorithm is like, oh, you like to lift weights? Oh, I see you bought this weird grip thing for your home gym. Let me feed you a ton of right wing content.
And I kind of have to keep going and be like, nope, nope, nope, not interested. And it just keeps wanting to, because it's like, well, you're, we know who you are.
You're a straight white man who likes to work out. We think we know you want just nothing but like Rogan clips and Shane Gillis monologues.
And, and I have to be like,

I don't,

well,

Shane Gillis is fine.

Some of the stuff's funny,

but I have to just keep telling it not to.

And I do think there is a,

there's something insidious in the information environment that connects to this notion of,

you know,

trans,

uh,

like attacks on trans rights.

You see this with people's trajectories where their entrance into going,

into losing their mind politically is on trans stuff.

Yeah.

Like they start there and they end up totally bonkers. So that is definitely like a bit of a gateway drug situation happening there.
But that I think is different than it being a politically useful mass political tool. And I have, again, when this started, when I saw this ramping up in 21, particularly into the midterms in 2022, I was worried it would be very politically effective.
Like I didn't know. I just think that the numbers have come back and shown it largely to be a dud.
And I think partly it has to do with salient. I don't know what it is.
I don't have a great answer, but I do think that there is, it hasn't worked and I'm grateful for that. Now, I should also say it hasn't worked politically, but they are they're serious.
They're not just doing this for political expediency, which is an important point. Republican legislatures are trying to ban trans care and essentially ban trans people because they hate them and don't want them to exist.
And they will do that even if it's not politically expedient because they are ideologically committed to the punishing of trans folks as a matter of principle, not just political expedience. That's scary and terrible.
I can't say that, like, there's lots of victories happening at the policy level because there's horrible things happening in a bunch of states. But it's not proven to be the electoral winner they were betting on.
Right. It's a similar.
We've seen this cycle play out before, too, which is just as Americans were gaining more and more acceptance of gay people. There was this last gasp of passing of amendments into constitutions across the country that took years to undo because politicians who had thought it was popular and was a deeply held conviction kept going.
Right. As they were as they were losing ground on the issue.
Well, and you see this right now on abortion. And I think you guys talk about this, and I think it's an important thing.
I always tell people, you see this with Biden in Israel right now. From the outside, I think people actually undercredit how much sincere belief and ideological formation informs the actions of politicians.
I think people really think that interest group lobbying, political experience, and all that stuff matters a huge amount. And it particularly matters on like low salient stuff.
People don't have really deeply held ideological beliefs on auto dealership regulation. And when and that's the kind of thing that lobbying just matters essentially 100 percent.
But on things like abortion or things like Israel or things like trans folks rights, there are people with really sincere beliefs who really believe sometimes horrible sincere beliefs who are really going to use their power to pursue those beliefs way past the flashing warning electoral signals. And this is exactly what's happening precisely on abortion right now.
Yeah. You see that on guns, you'll see people point to the money candidates have received from the gun lobby.
And it's an important fact, but it sort of doesn't, the cause and effect isn't exactly, isn't right there. Before we go to break, in case you missed it, Tommy teamed up with Roger Bennett of Men and Blazers once again for another season of World Corrupt.
This time they unpacked how Saudi Arabia, an oil rich nation with a troubled human rights record, has secured the role of World Cup host in 2034. The full series is out now.
So head on over to the Pod Save the World feed to binge it right now. One other note.
Figure skaters are doing backflips. TikTok is horny for George W.
Bush. Women in New York City are getting punched in the face.
Is it all connected? No. And thank God.
On the latest episode of Terminally Online, I sat down with Keep It host Ira Madison III, producers Caroline Rustin and Kendra James for a wide-ranging discussion of the internet's freshest nightmares. Tune in to this exclusive series by going to crooked.com slash friends right now.
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Just to go back to where we were at the beginning on pessimism versus optimism, I do think one thing that Trump did was certainly for a lot of heavily engaged progressives, it shook them.

It taught them that they didn't understand or had been perhaps a little too – had a lot of assumptions around what people they didn't know were like. And they thought, oh, wow, there's a lot of people out there that will tolerate immorality, that will tolerate vulgarity, that will tolerate cruelty in a way that they didn't totally understand.
And the Joe Biden theory from the very beginning of his campaign has been, this country is decent and decency will win. And I think I had the same fear, right, around, say, trans issues that you did.
They'll go, this is going to be an effective way to demagogue for them. Hasn't been as effective.
Oh, good. That is an interesting and important result about people's humanity, right? And the things that they think are silly or go too far or don't make sense to them.
You see the same thing on on immigration. Right.
We've we've had nonstop anti-immigration fervor on television for years. And yet still in the polls, you find that people don't that is not totally washed away a deeper sense of national identity.
You know, Trump is now doing, he called, he criticized Transgender Day of Visibility. And he declared November 5th Christian Visibility Day once he wins.
I know that was ironic in part because Easter is literally Christ Visibility Day. But I think it's a good place to sort of end, which is you had a conversation with a progressive evangelical about the kind of devil's bargain that conservative evangelicals made with Trump and whether or not that bargain held in 2020 and whether or not it will hold in 2024.
And I'm wondering what you think of that argument, that actually there is a disaffected group of people who are still tied to traditional Christian virtues and that they may make a difference. Yeah, a guy named Doug Padgett, who himself is an evangelical pastor and who's been doing this really cool kind of bridge building work where he tries to talk to evangelicals about their politics.

And he's a liberal but devout and pious and doesn't see a contradiction between those two. And one thing I found really useful to talking to him about, you know, it's such a cliche to be like X group isn't a monolith, but it really is true.

And it's also useful to just break these sort of, you know, evangelical or Christian Republicans. There's huge groups.
There's Southern Baptists. There's the Pentecostal tradition.
There's called sort of non-denominational. These are sort of three big theological categories.
And then within that, there's, you know, there's the folks who become almost sort of part of this cult, this sort of Trump as almost near Christlike figure, martyred, persecuted.

And then there's the sort of coldly transactional folks who still don't love the guy or think that he's vulgar or think that he's not.

They don't like the cruelty, but transactionally view him as vouchsafing their interests. And then there are people who are even uncomfortable with the agenda, but who culturally feel that they can't, for both cultural and kind of religious reasons, they can't deviate from voting for him.
And one of the points that he made was in the exit polls that he got a higher percentage of self-avowed evangelical voters in 16 than he did in 20. And it was eight points or something.
But eight points is not nothing. There's a lot of evangelical Christians in this country.
And every point matters. And he's out there sort of doing this work, trying to talk to people, not in an explicitly partisan sense, but it was down at the border in Eagle Pass and talking to people down there.
And one of the things I like that he said is he's talking about conversations in which he would quote something Trump would say and they would deny Trump said it. And he found that reassuring insofar as opposed to defending him saying something vile about immigrants, they just didn't believe it.
And the reason they didn't believe it is the way they were resolving the cognitive dissonance they had between their own principles and beliefs and their support of Trump was that there must be a lie somewhere or it must be out of context, which is better than, oh, yes, I also have this vile, odious view that dehumanizes other people. And the last thing that I found really interesting about that conversation, which loops back the immigration thing, is, you know, the best versions of evangelical Christian sort of mission and charity tends to be very international and focused, tends to be very, in its own weird way, cosmopolitan.
These people, whether you're in Uganda or you're in Guatemala or in Indonesia, if you're dealing with other folks, particularly other Christians, there's a fellowship that crosses these lines of national borders and race and ethnicity and background. And there's something beautiful in that when it can be used to get Christian groups, as they have done for literally decades and centuries in the country, taking refugees and minister to immigrants.
And there are still so many groups that are doing that and finding ways to revive that spirit that is there in a lot of people that even have experienced themselves, have gone and done work in orphanages in Guatemala and then come home and listen to Donald Trump say, these people are animals. I mean, they say literally the same people that there is some better angel to appeal to there on this issue.
Yeah. And there's plenty of criticism of that kind of missionary work.
Oh, of course. And I know you've talked about it, but that what it is also rooted in is obviously the opportunity to help, but that the way in which you as an individual are changed when you're exposed to the real lived suffering and experiences of other people, which is part of that tradition.
That's exactly right. And I think that, again, that cosmopolitanism, for lack of a better word, or universalism, it should be in deep tension with nationalism.
I mean, it really should be. God created all of us.
Jesus has saved all of us Christians across the lines of border. So why isn't that person, your Christian brother showing up bedraggled at the border? You know, that that commitment should make the nationalism harder.
In fact, it has been fused in service of the nationalism. But it doesn't mean that that again, we're talking about the kind of capital that builds up those institutional traditions, the muscle memory, the theological traditions that are there.
They're still there. They're still there.
And there's something to call on there. I think Barack Obama was smart in that rhetoric because he really understood that.
There's something to call on there when we talk about immigration. Yeah.
And also just that as evangelical becomes a form of political identity- Almost primarily. almost primarily.
It does leave a lot of people who might not feel as comfortable with that name as they once had available for this type of persuasion. Yeah, I agree with that as well.
Before we let you go, you are part of the Crooked family. You're married to strict scrutinies.
I am, I'm married into it. I'm a crooked in law, I think it's called.
Not since Thomas Jefferson dined alone, et cetera. What is the what I want? Here's my question for you.
What is the dumbest conversation you and Kate have had lately? Just the truly dumbest fucking bullshit, stupid conversation you two have had. It's not all amicus briefs and gender studies.
It can't be. That's a great question.
It is a lot of amicus briefs and gender studies. I have to be totally honest.
I mean, the fact of the matter is most of the dumb conversations are about the dumb logistics of a household that has three children and like four jobs. So so it's it's it's it's there is a lot of there's a lot of talking about the kids.
There's a lot of amicus briefs and gender studies and talking about the news and politics and, and the court and law. And then there's a lot of like, oh my God, did David's baseball practice get moved from that location to this location? And how are we going to get him there? I'm trying to think if we've had like a good, dumb.
I mean, we definitely, we did the, you know, we did the household what's up with kate conversation before the before the cancer announcement that happened oh you're just you're you really is it is just a it is a philosophy class at brown over no 24 hours a day i'm making 24 hours a day it's victenstein and well there was a lot of talk about butler there's a lot of talk about the various aspects of the stomach bug that moved through our house.

See, that's what I'm talking about.

That does it for me. There was a lot of that.

There was a lot of that.

Okay, okay.

I'll spare the listeners that.

For sure.

And that's why you're the best at this.

That's why you succeed across platforms.

Chris Hayes, thank you so much.

Everybody should check out

Why Is This Happening in this new series, The Stakes.

Everybody should check it out. Chris, what a pleasure.
Thanks for being here. Oh, that was so fun.
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