America’s reactionary moment

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0:01:30 of $500 or more. That’s $50 off with code grayarea@bluenile.com. It’s been almost two weeks since
0:01:37 the presidential election. The outcome was not what I wanted. But I cannot say that it was unexpected.
0:01:49 If anything surprised me, it was how definitive the Trump victory was.
0:01:56 And if anyone says that there’s a simple and obvious explanation, I would suggest not listening
0:02:06 to them anymore. There isn’t a reason for this. There are many reasons. And we just don’t know
0:02:12 enough right now to parse it out in a satisfying way. But that doesn’t mean that we have no idea
0:02:19 what just happened. We know plenty. The road to this result has been paved for several years and
0:02:25 regardless of who you voted for or what your politics are, I think we all have a duty to
0:02:42 read the political room as best we can. I’m Sean Elling and this is the gray area.
0:02:54 Today’s guest is Zach Beecham. Zach is a friend and a colleague here at Vox who recently published
0:03:02 a book called The Reactionary Spirit. The book is a deep dive into the historical roots of
0:03:09 reactionary politics, both here and around the world. But more than that, it’s a book about
0:03:16 democracy and the contradictions and the conflicts at the heart of it. What we can say pretty confidently
0:03:22 is that the roughly 75 million people who just voted for Trump were saying no to something.
0:03:29 They were saying no to lots of things to be more accurate. And I am genuinely interested in
0:03:35 understanding what so many people were rejecting and why and what lessons we might be able to draw
0:03:42 from that. This is Zach’s beat. In addition to his book, he writes a newsletter for Vox called
0:03:47 On the Right, which is all about the evolving nature of conservatism and the various ideas
0:03:54 and movements driving it. So in the aftermath of this election, I invited Zach on the show
0:03:57 to talk about what happened and what it could mean for our political future.
0:04:05 Zach Beecham, welcome to the show. Hey, Sean, it’s really, really great to be here with you.
0:04:09 It’s good to see you too, buddy. So there’s a lot I want to talk about, but I think
0:04:17 right out of the gate, let’s just address the orange elephant in the room. Yeah. Trump didn’t
0:04:25 just win the election. It was a fairly resounding win, not a historical blowout, but he gained
0:04:31 ground with basically every single demo. This isn’t Pod Save America, so we’re not here to do
0:04:37 an autopsy. But now that we’ve had a few days to let everything sink in,
0:04:43 how are you feeling? What do you make of what happened? Well, next time on Pod Save America,
0:04:47 I hope that they say this isn’t the gray area at the beginning, and then we go on to do something
0:04:52 very differently. Like, I would say we should separate out two different things, right? Like,
0:04:56 one is our analysis of what’s happening, and the other is how we feel about what happened,
0:05:01 both sort of emotionally and normatively. Like, how do we judge a reaction like this?
0:05:08 Analytically, I think we’re still pretty early to have any really strong conclusions,
0:05:13 but I will say that most of what people are saying as a result of that doesn’t make a
0:05:17 lot of sense to me, right? If you notice, there’s like a one-to-one correlation between someone’s
0:05:22 very detailed account of what happened in the election and their own priors about how politics
0:05:26 works. Fancy that, right? Or actually, it’s this other thing that had nothing to do with
0:05:30 my ideology, which, by the way, is my own inclination just from looking at the data.
0:05:33 You mentioned that Trump gained ground with basically every group, right? Like, well,
0:05:39 that only happens, this kind of uniform swing, when there’s something, some big structural
0:05:44 factor at play, right? And the things, the candidates that make sense to explain a shift from
0:05:51 2020 to 2024 are inflation, right? That’s new, and it’s been politically potent everywhere and
0:05:57 historically in the U.S. it matters. And anti-incumbent sentiment, which is like a worldwide
0:06:03 fact. It’s true in democracies around the world. Her biggest losses were in blue states.
0:06:08 And that suggests that something is going on that wasn’t just like Harris’ message is bad.
0:06:12 She didn’t say exactly the things that I thought you should say when you’re going to win,
0:06:14 right? Something else is happening.
0:06:20 I mean, there clearly wasn’t a reason. There are many reasons, and we’re going to be
0:06:24 parsing this out for a while, I’m sure.
0:06:27 Years? People are still fighting about 2016, so years.
0:06:37 Yeah, no shit. From your point of view, what were the most important material stakes
0:06:41 of this election? And I realize there’s a lot of uncertainty here, but it’s not a complete
0:06:46 black box. And I’m asking because I think this question is mostly lost in all the
0:06:54 horse race coverage and all the arguments about exit polling and what went wrong for Dems.
0:06:59 Yeah, look, what matters is that Donald Trump is coming into his second term agenda
0:07:07 with a very clear vision of what his movement is for and what he wants to wield power to get.
0:07:12 And that was not true in the first term. The first term, those of us that remember and were
0:07:18 journalists during it especially, was chaotic. A lot of things happened for reasons that were
0:07:25 hard to tell. The policy process was not streamlined. The people in charge had fundamentally
0:07:30 different ways of thinking about politics. This time around, I expect chaos. Trump is not a very
0:07:40 good manager, just of people like a good executive. But at the same time, I really do think that he
0:07:46 will come in an attempt to implement at least three things that are really important to him and
0:07:53 that have huge, huge stakes for people’s lives. The first one is mass deportation. I think there’s
0:07:59 no doubt that’s going to happen. How mass it is exactly, we don’t know, but it could be in the
0:08:06 millions of the number of people who are deported, which would be a massive disruption to all sorts
0:08:11 of different things from businesses that depend on these people to work from most importantly to
0:08:14 the people themselves and the communities that they’re a part of, of them being suddenly thrown
0:08:18 out of the country, some of whom maybe have never even left the United States.
0:08:25 Just to say that there is no non-horrendous way to execute that. It would be very ugly.
0:08:30 Correct. We’re talking ice agents going door to door, looking for people in certain areas.
0:08:35 We’re talking potentially camps where undocumented migrants are kept for
0:08:42 holding until they can be processed and deported. All of that’s a realistic possibility. This is
0:08:46 all stuff the Trump team has said themselves. It’s not just people projecting onto them.
0:08:50 Economic disruptions are real. The pain of individuals, what it’s going to do to American
0:08:54 society, that’s all I think going to happen. The only question is how big the scale is.
0:09:00 I think a similar thing like that is tariffs. We’re going to get fairly significant economic
0:09:06 disruptions. If you’re talking people don’t like inflation, just wait until every foreign made good
0:09:12 is 10% more expensive or whatever. If Trump targets China, escalating trade wars in the first term,
0:09:18 I think they continue through Biden’s term, by the way, contributed non-trivially to rising prices
0:09:26 and economic slowdown. I would expect that. Then the third thing, which is hard to process as a
0:09:32 material stake in the way that you put it, but is really important, is Trump’s plan to remake the
0:09:39 federal government in his image and purge critics from the ranks of the civil service.
0:09:47 This is profoundly dangerous, I would say, because what it means is not just
0:09:54 asserting political control over the state, though there’s that. There is a significant
0:09:59 element of democratic threat there. All the downstream consequences are potentially
0:10:03 quite dangerous, depending on which department you look at. I recently wrote a very long thing
0:10:08 about Trump’s plan for one division of the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division,
0:10:14 and how much that could be used as a tool of weakening certain foundations of American politics,
0:10:21 and that’s just one sub-branch of one branch. But it’s also not just democracy. It’s also
0:10:28 every function of the federal government that depends on non-partisan experience civil
0:10:33 servants could potentially be affected by this. The consequences are almost unpredictably large.
0:10:40 One example is that it’s not outside the realm of Trump’s power to encourage localities,
0:10:46 if he doesn’t power RFK Jr. in the way he suggested, to eliminate vaccine mandates in schools.
0:10:51 And if that happens, we’re talking about an unprecedented experiment in a developed country
0:10:56 reversing vaccines that had kept the rate of preventable diseases down at a marginal level,
0:11:00 the reduction of herd immunity across the United States. So it’s not just a red area problem.
0:11:05 If red states are the only one following federal guidance, it’s like potentially we’re talking
0:11:12 national returns of diseases thought defeated. And again, I want to emphasize that these are just
0:11:18 two examples. I pulled almost at random from the list of examples because I’ve been thinking about
0:11:23 them for a variety of reasons recently. If Trump does the things that he says he’s going to do,
0:11:27 the revisions to the American state and the functioning of the American government model
0:11:35 will be fundamental. But that’s what is so wow to me. How much of the faith in Donald Trump
0:11:43 really depends on him not doing the things he says he’s absolutely going to do.
0:11:51 What a gamble. I mean, I think that a lot of people can’t believe it. They just hear stuff
0:11:57 like that and they can’t. And some people just don’t think about it. They go to vote because
0:12:03 they’re angry that groceries are somewhat more expensive and they have seen some scary images
0:12:08 of the border on TV. And I don’t mean to make light of people for doing this. This is what
0:12:13 democracy is. Not everybody spends all day thinking about politics, they’re not supposed to and they
0:12:19 shouldn’t. It’s not like they’re morally blameworthy for casting a vote based on limited information.
0:12:28 Again, that is what democracy is. It’s just that the sheer radicalism of Trump’s policies are
0:12:34 difficult to understand unless you’re really well versed in how the US federal government works.
0:12:45 That’s not most people. And one thing I write about extensively in my book is how anti-democratic
0:12:52 politics functions by masking itself in both democratic language but also in being boring,
0:12:58 right? And being normal, seeming like just sort of like everyday stuff inside the political system.
0:13:04 And I really think that a lot of how Trump got away with promising to do significant damage
0:13:10 to American democracies because it didn’t register to most people as operating in that way.
0:13:16 Well, let’s get into that. You’ve covered the American right for a long time. You just wrote
0:13:22 an excellent book about this. You have a great Vox newsletter called On the Right, which is very
0:13:28 much about this. And so that’s where I want to move this conversation. And let’s just set aside
0:13:33 the election for a minute, though we’re probably going to keep coming back to it. We just can’t
0:13:42 help it. But when someone asks you, what is American conservatism in 2024? What is your answer?
0:13:53 Not conservatism. What we call the conservative movement today is not what the conservative
0:13:58 movement historically has been in the United States. It’s a species of reactionary politics.
0:14:05 And the distinction, I think, rests in the party’s fundamental attitude towards democracy and
0:14:12 democratic institutions. The old Republican Party, for all of its faults, played by the
0:14:19 political rules. It had faith in the idea that elections determine the winner and that when
0:14:25 elections happen, you accept the verdict of the people and you adjust based on that,
0:14:29 regardless of whether or not you like the policy preferences. Again, we can already start to see
0:14:33 the scenes in this narrative, the emergencies of certain Trumpisms, because you’d be like,
0:14:38 well, what about the 2000 election? To which I would say, exactly. That’s evidence that there was
0:14:44 always a component of this more radical version of the right. But even that was much more system
0:14:52 oriented and system accepting than what the Republican Party has become, which in the language
0:14:57 that I use in my book is a reactionary party. And reactionary parties are different from
0:15:05 conservatism in that they both share an orientation towards believing that certain ways in which
0:15:13 society is arranged, certain setups, institutions, even hierarchies are good and necessary, right?
0:15:18 That there’s value in the way that things are. What differs between the two of them is that
0:15:25 conservative parties don’t see potential social change as an indictment of democracy. That is
0:15:31 to say, even if a democracy or an election produces an outcome that they don’t like,
0:15:36 that threatens to transform wholesale certain elements of the social order,
0:15:40 a conservative would not throw out the political order as a consequence of that.
0:15:44 Reactionaries are willing to do that. And my view is that the core of the Trump movement,
0:15:50 which I want to distinguish from every Trump supporter, they’re not the same. But the people
0:15:56 who have given Donald Trump an iron grip on the Republican Party, that sort of hardcore of support
0:16:02 are animated primarily by reactionary politics, by a sense that things have gone too far in a
0:16:07 socially liberal and culturally liberal and even in some cases economically liberal direction.
0:16:15 And they want things to go back to partially a past that never existed, but also a past that
0:16:22 did exist, where there was a little bit more order and structure in terms of who is in charge
0:16:32 and what the rules were. I should say, I think we both respect the conservative instinct.
0:16:38 I genuinely think that, and we’ve talked about this before, the challenge of political
0:16:45 life is navigating the tension between order and progress, which is very difficult.
0:16:52 And you put it well in the book, the small d democratic right sees virtue and tradition
0:16:57 and danger and change. There’s wisdom in that orientation, correct?
0:17:02 I absolutely think that part of what’s made me so nervous about the 2024 election results is that
0:17:09 Trump has a much more anti-system orientation on foreign policy than he did in the past and that
0:17:17 the international order as defined post-World War II really orients around the United States playing
0:17:21 this core stabilizing role and being willing to involve itself in all sorts of things that
0:17:28 most Americans don’t see or even care about, but that do play a role in global financial
0:17:34 political stability. A lot of what Trump wants to do is tear down the things that make that work.
0:17:42 I feel very conservative saying this, but if you take a hammer to that system and you change it
0:17:45 because you think it’s not delivering in certain ways, which it isn’t by the way,
0:17:49 it’s not perfect, it’s doing a lot of things that I think are very good, but if you take a
0:17:53 hammer to that system, you don’t know what the consequences are going to be. I think they’re
0:18:02 likely to be quite dangerous. That impulse, that sense that whatever the critiques are,
0:18:05 and there are many, when I say things like this, people often say, “How can you support an
0:18:11 international order that is yielding the inhumanity in Gaza?” Which I take it. That’s a very classic
0:18:18 progressive critique of conservatism. X feature of the status quo is bad, is unacceptable even
0:18:22 morally. How dare you support the status quo as a whole to which the conservative replies reasonably?
0:18:26 Well, that’s really bad and we should try to do something about it, but that doesn’t mean you
0:18:32 throw the baby out with the bathwater. That doesn’t mean that you should say, “Okay, the whole
0:18:36 thing is irredeemable. Let’s throw it out or let’s transform everything.” That’s how I feel about
0:18:40 the international system. What makes me very worried about Trumpism is that part of its reactionary
0:18:45 politics is saying the international order is a symptom of the leftism that we just like so much.
0:18:53 There’s a political scientist we both know at Harvard, Daniel Ziblatt. You discussed his work
0:19:02 in your book pretty early on. He made the case, I think, successfully that the countries in Europe
0:19:08 that transitioned successfully into democracy were the countries that had the strongest
0:19:14 conservative parties, which sounds a little counterintuitive at first. But this is an important
0:19:19 point. What was his explanation for that? Because it does speak to the inherent utility of having,
0:19:25 of saying, healthy conservative party. Yeah. Historically speaking, the base of conservative
0:19:31 parties has been the social and economic elite, which makes sense. Who benefits the most from
0:19:38 the status quo? Well, it’s the wealthy and the powerful and the influential. They need some way
0:19:44 to organize their interests and defend them, whether or not you agree with whatever their
0:19:53 policies are for defending those things. My read of Ziblatt’s book is that he sees conservative
0:20:02 parties as a means of structuring those interests and channeling them into pro-system politics.
0:20:06 That is to say, if these rich people, powerful people in society, believe that they can get what
0:20:12 they want through the electoral system, they don’t feel as much of a threat when democracy delivers
0:20:20 results that are contrary to their own views that maybe level the playing field a little bit for
0:20:25 people lower down on the social and economic hierarchy. They’re willing to tolerate losing
0:20:29 elections periodically as long as they think that they’ll have a chance to win again in the future
0:20:36 and that they feel like the policy results aren’t fundamentally, let’s say, I don’t know,
0:20:41 lead them to the guillotine. But when they don’t have a party like that, something that can advocate
0:20:46 for them in elections, a strong party, and I use the guillotine example deliberately, right? If you
0:20:50 read a history of the French Revolution, it’s just a story of like leftward and leftward and
0:20:58 leftward movements until there’s not any party that could properly even resemble anything described
0:21:03 as being on the right. It’s just a division between more and less radical people on the left
0:21:08 that in countries like that where the right felt that the very nature of the political system,
0:21:13 the democratic system, had become an existential threat to their, often their physical survival,
0:21:19 let alone their economic status. Well, they’re willing to support extreme measures like the
0:21:27 restoration of the bourbon monarchy in order to safeguard themselves. So that’s what a conservative
0:21:34 party does, right? It advocates and stabilizes the social order by serving to bring the most
0:21:42 powerful people in that order into the system itself. And the problem is when you lack a conservative
0:21:49 party or what was once a conservative party is no longer acting as such, your political system
0:21:53 gets a little off kilter. And to repeat, we currently lack an actually conservative party
0:21:59 in America. Yeah, great. You know, I was trusting your listeners to get the get the inference there.
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0:26:05 [Music]
0:26:11 The reactionary spirit you’re talking about. It is a form of anti-democratic politics and we see it
0:26:19 in democratic societies when there’s a perceived threat to the social order, to traditional
0:26:28 hierarchies. And that becomes the justification for using all forms of power to undermine democracy
0:26:34 from within. First of all, how is this different from fascism? Is it that reactionary politics
0:26:41 claims to be a defense of true democracy, whereas fascism is just an outright rejection of the whole
0:26:50 democratic project? The way I would see it is that oftentimes fascism is a species of reactionary
0:26:56 politics, but there are plenty of variants of reactionary movements that are not fascist
0:27:02 in orientation. They have some different ideological tenor to them. A lot of
0:27:09 anti-democratic parties historically, let’s say, we were just talking about 19th-century
0:27:14 Europe. That was before fascism existed. Monarchism, like anti-revolutionary monarchism,
0:27:19 was certainly a variant of reactionary politics in the sense that there had been a change to
0:27:24 the social order that led people to turn against democracy itself, but it wasn’t fascist in the
0:27:32 sense that it didn’t have all of the specific hallmarks of mid-century European authoritarianism.
0:27:37 We can go down the list and there are different examples, but I think what it means to be a
0:27:46 example of the reactionary spirit is to be an extreme right party that, for whatever reason,
0:27:51 believes that change has gone too far and that overthrowing democracy in one way or another
0:27:56 is the solution. Now, the point you made earlier about playing within the contours of the democratic
0:28:01 game is really important, but I think it speaks to different facet of the reactionary spirit and
0:28:10 its mutability. Reactionary politics doesn’t go away after fascism. The extreme right is
0:28:16 delegitimized, like, morally in a lot of places, not everywhere, but certainly in the Atlantic West.
0:28:25 What happens is not that people all of a sudden are fine with social progress, challenges to the
0:28:30 economic hierarchy, and are unwilling to do anything about it, or even that they’ve just
0:28:35 reconciled themselves fully to losing democratic elections. There are always people who reject
0:28:40 those things, but they recognize that the public has mostly gotten on board with democracy and
0:28:46 still is, by the way, as much anti-system or anti-elite sentiment as there is right now. People
0:28:50 still generally want to have elections and want to be able to choose who leads them. They’re pulling
0:28:57 on that’s pretty clear. They adapt their rhetoric. I think this is an important difference between
0:29:03 modern reactionary politics and a fascist reactionary politics, is that fascists and monarchists,
0:29:08 too, they would outright say, “We are against democracy. Democracy is bad. We need to replace it.”
0:29:14 Now, authoritarian’s tend to have a more subtle message, at least when they’re operating inside
0:29:18 a country that’s already a democracy. They’re trying to contest elections with an electorate
0:29:25 that believes in democracy as the governing logic of the system. What they do is say,
0:29:30 “We are the true democrats.” It’s the other people, these opponents who are trying to,
0:29:38 through their radical leftism, radical Marxism, you’ve heard all of these terms, are trying to
0:29:43 overthrow our system of government, not us. They stole the election. We didn’t lose it.
0:29:49 Isn’t it that we see elections as illegitimate? It’s that Joe Biden, his nefarious thugs,
0:29:54 somehow managed to secretly rig the 2020 election behind our backs. That difference,
0:30:01 playing within the ideological contours of democratic discourse, allows them to succeed
0:30:07 in an environment where being called a fascist is still a slur. Trump didn’t say, “I’m a fascist.”
0:30:11 Yay, when he was called that, he was like, “Look at how they’re trying to call you a fascist,
0:30:15 and aren’t you angry about that?” It’s all taking place in a very different
0:30:19 ideological environment than previous bouts of authoritarianism.
0:30:24 We can make the case that Trumpism is a reactionary movement, but
0:30:35 what is Trumpism really reacting against? What it seems to be, increasingly, is a rejection of
0:30:43 the ruling elites, a rejection of the professional managerial class, which is more about class and
0:30:51 culture than race and the preservation of traditional hierarchies. How do you make
0:30:57 sense of that? Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of analytic slippage going on in that account,
0:31:01 and I think we need to be really careful when we talk about it. That’s the classiest way someone
0:31:06 just called me wrong, by the way. A little analytical slippage there, sir. There’s a little
0:31:11 bit of slippage here. I’m speaking for the critics. This is how I run away from everything.
0:31:15 Yeah, I didn’t want to tell you. Many people are saying that.
0:31:20 Many people are saying that. That’s actually true. They’re wrong, and I think in important
0:31:26 sense, but write in another one. Let’s start with wrong. When we talk about what Trumpism is,
0:31:33 we need to specify what we’re talking about. I don’t think looking at a general election and
0:31:40 saying that person voted for Trump is necessarily to say that person is a Trumpist. If somebody was
0:31:45 considering voting for Harris or maybe voted for Democrats down ballot, it might not make
0:31:51 sense to think of their behavior through a purely ideological lens, because they may not even have
0:31:54 firm ideological beliefs. Many swing voters don’t. If you look at the way they talk about
0:32:00 politics, it’s just sort of jumbled. Again, I’m not saying that they are bad for having jumbled
0:32:05 views. That’s a fact about people who don’t pay attention to politics very much. Even people
0:32:12 who do have jumbled views. That’s true. Fair enough. If you look at Trump’s core supporters,
0:32:20 though, the story of racial and social grievance, anger about immigration,
0:32:28 a sense of alienation from the United States after Obama really personalized the changing
0:32:35 social order, all of that is remarkably consistent among the people who will turn out to vote for
0:32:41 Trump in a Republican primary. It’s been true over and over again. The evidence is overwhelmingly
0:32:48 strong that this is their core motivation in Trump politics, in being engaged in this movement.
0:32:55 Nothing about this election result changes that. What that part of the story does is help us
0:33:01 understand why Trump has gained control over one of our two major political parties.
0:33:05 Why it is that he crushed traditional Republicans who are unwilling to give those voters
0:33:10 what they wanted in such clear terms. Those voters had become a majority of the Republican
0:33:18 party internally. More than that, it’s why vast, vast, vast bulk of Republicans rejected the 2020
0:33:22 election when previously they had believed elections were legitimate. It’s why so many
0:33:26 people were willing to swallow the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. That’s
0:33:32 like one category of explanation. Then we’re talking about shifts in coalitions between different
0:33:37 elections. Here, the analysis becomes a lot trickier because we’re not talking about what makes
0:33:42 up the core of an ideological movement because all of those voters are baked into voting for
0:33:47 Trump no matter what. You have 46, 47% of the electorate that’s not going to change their mind
0:33:54 no matter what on both sides, but maybe a bit of exaggeration but not much. You end up having
0:34:01 these voters in the middle. What causes someone to change their votes between elections is not
0:34:08 the same thing as what engages really highly motivated, highly ideological voters who make
0:34:12 up a political movement. They’re swing voters. They’re not Trumpists in the clear sense just
0:34:18 because you voted for Trump once. Collapsing that distinction leads to analytic mistakes.
0:34:23 I think trying to be careful about what we’re saying and the kinds of claims that we’re making
0:34:29 and analyzing election results is really important. I just continue to have a hard time
0:34:37 parsing out all the forces that are combining to scramble our politics. There’s so much
0:34:43 alienation. It’s a very lonely society. Our democracy doesn’t feel very participatory
0:34:48 for lots of people, so there’s not enough investment in it. I think social media,
0:34:53 media fragmentation more generally, the collapse of consensus reality, it’s all been very
0:35:01 destabilizing. I’m just going to keep saying that I think millions of people have never experienced
0:35:07 real political disorder. I think they take liberal democracy for granted and frankly,
0:35:13 don’t take politics very seriously. It is a reality TV show and they’re entertained by
0:35:18 Trump and they think he’s funny and he’ll make eggs a little cheaper and also drive coastal
0:35:25 elites insane and that’s kind of it. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s really, that’s true for a lot of
0:35:30 people, right? A lot of people. A lot of people, especially that point about taking liberal democracy
0:35:38 for granted is so important. I think it’s that when you live in a political order for a long
0:35:43 period of time, you just came to take it as like a baseline. This is the way that things are,
0:35:51 right? It’s not that you can’t even envision fundamental change. It’s that you don’t even have
0:35:58 the vocabulary necessary or the sense of perspective necessary to believe that you
0:36:03 should be envisioning radical change. It just doesn’t enter into your daily life, right? If you
0:36:09 look at interviews with swing voters and the way that they talk about politics or talk to them
0:36:15 yourselves, the sense that you get is not that these people are like, “I want to burn American
0:36:20 democracy to the ground.” It’s that they’ve got a choice between two candidates, like they do every
0:36:25 election and they pick the one who represents whatever their grievances are at this moment in
0:36:30 time or whatever their anger or frustration or even hopes and dreams are at this moment in time.
0:36:34 Lots of different things go into for a voter that changes their mind election to election.
0:36:41 What speaks to that and the stuff about who Trump really is and what he really stands for,
0:36:48 the system-threatening part of it, it just doesn’t even register because it seems too remote to feel
0:36:55 real. Not just remote. It also feels, I think we’ve talked about this a little bit, it feels
0:37:01 a little too silly and absurd often, right? I mean, figuring out how to situate Trump in this
0:37:09 story has always been weird for me. I think he’s too nihilistic to be the leader of anything other
0:37:18 than a personality cult. But the question, I guess, for you is, has he become more like a vehicle
0:37:26 that serious ideological reactionaries are using to advance their serious political project?
0:37:37 I mean, I’m going to say yes and no. So yes, in the sense that Trump does not have the mind for
0:37:51 detailed policy work. It’s just not what he cares about. It’s not. He doesn’t want to try to understand
0:37:55 how something like Schedule F is going to work. He’s not going to be in the details going through
0:38:01 staff directories. He doesn’t really know how the federal government relates to local prosecutors
0:38:06 and what the authority is to punish the people who went after him, but he wants to do it and he
0:38:10 wants someone to figure out how to do it. And that’s the stuff that he’s immediately concerned
0:38:15 with. And there’s the stuff that’s relatively far afield. Do you think Trump really has a sense
0:38:22 of what the Department of Labor does or cares? Absolutely. No. No. He’s no sense, right? And
0:38:27 we’ll just do whatever people around him or the last person he talked to suggested that he does
0:38:32 or the last person that he liked that he talked to. So in that sense, yeah, a lot of what happens
0:38:37 in Trump administrations, now that we have to use the plural, is going to be determined by the
0:38:43 political world around him. And I also don’t think he has a sincere commitment to anti-democracy
0:38:49 either. He would never write a book where he lays out a coherent political ideology that
0:38:54 he sincerely believes. He puts forward whatever makes sense at a time. But, Zach, this is my
0:38:59 problem with him. He’s not committed to anything. I have always felt that his political genius
0:39:04 consists in making himself into an avatar onto which people can project whatever they need to
0:39:11 project. And he’s just so well-equipped to be this kind of vehicle that I’m talking about. Because,
0:39:15 again, I genuinely do not think he cares about anything other than himself. I mean, if the man
0:39:21 had to choose between preserving liberal democracy for another century or building a beautiful new
0:39:27 golf course in Saudi Arabia, is there any doubt he’d build the fucking golf course? That’s his
0:39:32 level of commitment to democracy. No, but I think that that’s a mistake,
0:39:37 right? Because it’s not that he doesn’t have a commitment to democracy in the sense that he’s
0:39:46 not attached to it. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the idea that he can’t do whatever he wants
0:39:51 when he gets power. He gets very angry when people say, “You can’t do that,” or, “That’s illegal.”
0:39:57 And he openly admires leaders in other countries who have either always been authoritarian,
0:40:03 like Xi Jinping in China, or who have torn down their own democracies, like Putin or Victor
0:40:09 Orban in Hungary. He thinks that they’re strong and that it’s great that they get to do stuff like
0:40:13 that. And again, this is not an ideological commitment to authoritarianism either. It’s not
0:40:18 like Trump has a sincere belief that authoritarian systems work better or deliver better in some
0:40:25 kind of meaningful sense. It’s a gut level, “I like that. I want to be like that.” It’s when he said,
0:40:30 in those comments that were recently reported, “I want generals like Hitler’s generals.” It’s not
0:40:34 like he was saying, “I want generals who will follow my orders to exterminate the Jews.” He’s
0:40:39 saying, “I want people who listen to me and do the things that I say, whatever those things are,
0:40:45 however crazy they might seem.” And in that sense, he has a gut level authoritarianism and it’s
0:40:50 reactionary in the sense that he very clearly hates a lot of the social change that has happened.
0:40:56 So he does really classically fit the pattern I describe in the book. But it’s not because he,
0:41:01 unlike someone like, say, Orban or Narendra Modi in India or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel,
0:41:08 all of them have complex ideological beliefs. Orban’s are mostly for show, by the way. He mostly
0:41:14 cares about power, but he’s a very sophisticated ideological operator. And Netanyahu and Modi
0:41:18 are for real ideologues. They really do believe a lot of what they’re saying.
0:41:21 I think that’s more what I was speaking to. It’s clear that Trump wants power. It’s just
0:41:27 not clear to me what he really wants to do with it. It’s not clear to me what it will be in service
0:41:30 of. Yeah. I mean, there are two things, right? Like two things that I think he does care about,
0:41:34 right? He does believe that we need to get the immigrants out of our country. He really does
0:41:39 believe that. It’s been true for decades in his statements. It’s one thing he’s been consistent
0:41:45 on. And the second, he believes that free trade is bad for America. It’s like a really fixed belief
0:41:51 for him. It’s unchangeable. No amount of evidence could cause him to change his mind on this topic.
0:41:55 The only question is how far he’s willing to go in pursuing an anti-trade agenda.
0:42:02 And those two things reflect a deeper worldview, I think, a sense of the world as a fundamentally
0:42:07 zero someplace, where it can’t be the case that migrants coming to the U.S. is good for
0:42:12 native-born citizens, right? Someone has to win and someone has to lose. It can’t be the case that
0:42:18 both countries involved in a trading arrangement benefit. Someone has to get the better of the
0:42:22 deal that’s being made between the two sides. And you see this in his approach to foreign policy,
0:42:28 too. It can’t be the case that the Atlantic Alliance is something that stabilizes the world
0:42:35 for everybody. It’s that the Europeans are taking America for a ride. Americans are letting them
0:42:42 slide on their own defense obligations and footing the bill. So it’s bad for us because we’re the
0:42:48 militarily stronger component of the alliance and on down the list. And so that sort of constellation
0:42:55 of instincts, the zero sum-ness of it all filters down into perspectives on different policy issues.
0:43:01 But it’s not in the same way as somebody who has a doctrine, a set of propositions that they believe
0:43:06 about the world that have been applied to different cases. It’s just he has sort of feelings about
0:43:12 stuff. And the feelings about stuff translates into some relatively stable policy views in some
0:43:15 areas where he doesn’t really think that much or care that much about it. And when he doesn’t care,
0:43:20 he is willing to be protean in the way that you described, to just change his mind on abortion
0:43:24 whenever he feels like it and whatever the audience is and say wildly different contradictory stuff
0:43:27 depending on what feels like in his interest at that moment in time.
0:43:33 Yeah, I think it’s clear he certainly has instincts. And I think those instincts can be
0:43:40 properly called authoritarian. I’m curious what you make a JD Vance. I mean, I know he’s shape
0:43:47 shifted quite a bit here in the last few years, but he seems to me to be seriously ideological
0:43:52 in a way that maybe Trump isn’t. I mean, is he the future of the political right? What does
0:43:57 he represent? What does he want? I think he is sincerely ideological. I think this is in part
0:44:02 because I’ve met him and I’ve interviewed him, however briefly, but also because I’ve talked
0:44:08 to people who know him pretty well. Just through random chance, we have a good friend in common,
0:44:12 his former law school roommate who’s now a state senator in Georgia named Josh McClearn.
0:44:17 And I talked to Josh a lot about this. And he’s like, well, JD is really motivated by
0:44:26 anger. He’s just a very angry person. And in Josh’s accounting, that anger has shifted from
0:44:33 being an anger in part at the circumstances under which he was raised, which you can see on
0:44:38 display in Hillbilly Elegy and the way that he talks condescendingly in a lot of times about
0:44:43 other poor whites and about how he’s the one who made it out and they have cultural problems that
0:44:50 prevent them from doing so. It’s a very classic conservative text in those ways. But now his
0:44:55 resentments, he’s always had these, but I think they’ve come to the fore, are primarily directed
0:45:02 at other elites. He’s angry about the way that the elite establishment and the Ivy League and
0:45:06 the business world and the political world treats people who believe the sorts of things that he
0:45:14 believes. And he’s come to align himself with Trumpism and builds a broader doctrine around
0:45:19 that anger that’s very, very hostile to the current political arrangement, the current political order
0:45:23 in a fundamental sense. I mean, he literally called himself, at one event, an anti-regime
0:45:29 leader. That’s the nature of his politics. He believes the fact that he refers to the United
0:45:34 States as a regime to begin with is, I think, telling in the way that he thinks about things.
0:45:40 And so, Vance, people differ on how serious he is about his Trumpist ideological
0:45:45 turn. I happen to, for the reasons I just described, think it’s serious. But ultimately,
0:45:52 what someone actually believes matters less than what they do with that belief. And most of the
0:45:57 time, politicians are what they say, not what they feel in their hearts. It’s the commitments
0:46:01 they make in public that bind them to a certain policy direction and cause them to act in a
0:46:06 particular way. And the alliances they cultivate, the networks they need to survive as politicians.
0:46:13 Whether or not Vance believes the radical stuff that he said, he’s bound to it. He
0:46:19 pals around with people like Curtis Yervin, who’s a monarchist. And Vance has cited him as explicitly
0:46:23 as an influence on how he thinks about executive branch staffing in a second Trump administration.
0:46:29 He is thinking about how to remake the federal government through the lens of the work of a
0:46:34 guy who wants to topple democracy, which is a wild thing to say about the vice president elect,
0:46:43 but is absolutely true, I mean, by his own words. And I don’t know if Vance has the charisma to pull
0:46:50 off what Trump does. Like you said earlier, Trump is funny. He is, he’s really funny, right?
0:46:53 I don’t know if you’ve seen JD ordering donuts in a diner, it’s
0:47:02 we really blew off the diner folks away. Yeah, it’s like most people are going to come across
0:47:07 a stilted interactions like that. Like Lord knows that’s not. Yeah, but with some people,
0:47:13 you can see the ones and zeros a little more. Fair enough. Fair enough. But I think
0:47:17 I think honestly, like Sean, if you had JD Vance on your show, he would come across as like a
0:47:23 pretty natural guy and it probably would be a pretty fun conversation, right? This is the kind
0:47:27 of meeting. I’ve talked to him before. Yeah, yeah, right? I talked to him before, it was years ago,
0:47:33 right after his book, and he really struck me as a very different person then. Yeah, but fair enough.
0:47:39 Then he is now. And so I don’t know how that interaction would go today. But if he was like
0:47:46 on this right now and you or me or both of us characterized him as a reactionary, would he
0:47:50 own that label? Or would he describe his political project differently?
0:47:54 That’s an interesting question. I know he wouldn’t characterize it in the way that I characterize
0:48:00 it. Like he wouldn’t say, yeah, I’m dedicated to tearing democracy down. Because that’s part of,
0:48:04 in my accounting, that’s part of what makes reactionary politics work today,
0:48:10 is you have to explicitly say I’m for democracy, right? And then claim the mantle of democratic
0:48:16 elections in order to tear down the scaffolding that makes fair elections possible in the future.
0:48:22 But I think that if you asked Vance, do you reject your previous characterization of yourself as an
0:48:27 anti-regime candidate or an anti-regime politician? He’d say, of course not. That’s what I believe.
0:48:36 I believe the regime is a coterie of liberals and unaccountable positions in culture and the
0:48:44 “deep state” in academia that exercise undue influence and do so against the wills and the
0:48:48 beliefs and the majority of the American people. And I’m speaking for them. And my political project
0:48:53 is to destroy the powers of these unaccountable elites and bring things back to the people.
0:48:57 I think that’s what he would say. I don’t think that’s what he actually is doing.
0:49:02 And I don’t know the extent to which he believes that he’s really the guy who is putting things
0:49:09 back in charge of normal people, or whether he just says that for show. But that comes awful
0:49:14 close without the anti-democratic part to how I would define reactionary. It just, you know,
0:49:19 the tiny little bitty question of whether or not you believe elections should be fair.
0:49:26 Whatever one thinks of Trump’s appeal and why so many people voted for him, I think we’ve discussed
0:49:34 lots of people voted for him for lots of different reasons. The fact is, he is not committed to
0:49:39 liberal democracy. He is not committed to the rule of law. And that creates a lot of uncertainty
0:49:47 about what might happen. One of the things you do in the book is challenge American exceptionalism.
0:49:53 I mean, this idea that we’re immune to certain kinds of political chaos because we’re America.
0:50:02 Do you think our institutions will continue to hold? I think they will. I don’t think this
0:50:08 is the end of the Republic. But I’ll confess that I’m not super duper confident about that.
0:50:16 Yeah. I mean, I think that there is no reason to expect that elections will be formally abolished
0:50:21 by 2028 in the way that some wild-eyed commentators and social media have suggested.
0:50:27 I think there is a moderate chance that their fairness is severely undermined by then,
0:50:32 a not unreasonable one. And I think there is a very high chance that some of the core institutions
0:50:37 of American democracy will be damaged in ways that have significant long-term consequences.
0:50:43 But differently, I don’t think this election itself is the end of American democracy. It spells
0:50:48 the formal abolition of it. I do think it is the beginning of the greatest test American
0:50:53 democracy has seen since the Civil War of its resilience. And the outcome of that test is not
0:51:01 determined with a huge range of probabilities ranging from truly catastrophic to merely somewhat
0:51:09 banned. And just to the point is not lost, what makes this to you a more significant test than the
0:51:17 first Trump administration? I mean, it’s the degree to which they have clear and cogent plans
0:51:21 about what they want to do and the anti-democratic nature of those plans.
0:51:25 Coming into office last time, Trump didn’t have a vendetta against large chunks of the government.
0:51:29 He didn’t believe an election had been stolen from him and that needed to be rectified. And he
0:51:34 really believes that. It’s like a slight to his personal self. At the very least, he thinks it
0:51:38 is a public blemish that needs to be shown to be false to many people because if many people
0:51:42 believe that he won, then that’s good enough. It doesn’t matter if he actually did.
0:51:47 Well, what matters, I guess, maybe to put it differently is Donald Trump’s honor. And the
0:51:53 honor of Donald Trump must be avenged at all costs. And the insult of 2020 must be erased
0:51:59 from the history books. That’s the kind of thing that he cares about. And the degree and scope of
0:52:04 the planning that has gone into this and the willingness to take a hammer to different institutions
0:52:09 to the US government and the specificity of the plans for doing. So to name just one example
0:52:18 from Project 2025, they want to prosecute the former Pennsylvania Secretary of State who presided
0:52:25 over the 2020 elections using the CLAN Act, which was passed to fight the first CLAN. And it’s
0:52:33 basically alleging that by trying to help people fix improperly filed mail-in ballots in 2020,
0:52:41 that this Pennsylvania Secretary of State candidate was rigging the election, trying to
0:52:47 undermine everyone else’s fair exercise of their votes in a way akin to the CLAN intimidating
0:52:54 black voters in the 1860s by threatening to lynch them. This is like a crazy charge on
0:52:58 substantive legal grounds. When I speak to legal experts about this, they’re like,
0:53:05 no credible prosecutor I know would bring such a charge. It’s a real abuse of power and anti-democratic
0:53:11 in many ways because it’s like trying to wield federal power to prevent local authorities from
0:53:17 administering elections properly and helping people vote. So in order to try to even begin an
0:53:23 investigation on this front, let alone actually prosecute, what you need to do is fire the people
0:53:27 who would do that kind of job, which would typically be in the Justice Department’s
0:53:30 Civil Rights Division or also the Election Crimes Unit in the Criminal Division,
0:53:36 fire those people who would work on these cases, bring in attorneys who are willing to do what you
0:53:42 say, even though it’s ludicrous on the basis of a traditional read of the law, and then initiate
0:53:49 an investigation, try to get charges spun up, and then get them to a judge like Eileen Cannon,
0:53:53 who’s presiding over Trump’s documents case, and has clearly shown herself to not really care about
0:53:58 what’s going on, but rather just interpret the law in whatever ways must favorable to Trump.
0:54:05 All of that stuff, this is just one specific example, but it illustrates the ways in which
0:54:09 you’re doing what Trump and his allies have outlined as part of their revenge campaign,
0:54:16 requires attacking very fundamental components of American democracy. The building blocks,
0:54:22 like the rule of law, like a non-partisan civil service that treats all citizens equally,
0:54:26 like a judiciary that’s designed with interpreting the law as best as it can, rather than delivering
0:54:33 policy outlines. You need all of those things in order to act on already offered promises
0:54:39 in what is widely understood to be the planning document for the Trump administration, like the
0:54:46 main one. That is a threat, a concerted authoritarian campaign, unlike anything the United States has
0:54:52 seen in its history, really, at the federal level. There’s nothing, I’m trying to think,
0:54:57 and there’s just no good parallel. There have been more serious challenges to American democracy
0:55:03 before, but they mostly took place in the case of either foreign attacks, like the War of 1812,
0:55:11 and internal violent challenges, the Civil War, in many ways Jim Crow was a state-level
0:55:17 challenge to American democracy. But you haven’t had, at any point, a federal government
0:55:23 that has made one of its central missions be crushing the various constituent parts that
0:55:27 make a democracy work. That’s a new one for the United States.
0:55:46 Support for the Gray Area comes from Greenlight. A piggy bank might be cute for a five-year-old,
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0:55:56 Greenlight is a debit card and money app made specifically with families in mind. You can send
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0:56:10 The app even includes a chores feature, where you can set up recurring responsibilities for your
0:56:16 kids, allowing them to earn a regular allowance each week. My kids are a little too young for it.
0:56:21 We’re still in the piggy bank phase, but I’ve got a colleague here at Vox who uses it with his two
0:56:28 boys, and he loves it. You can sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com/grayarea.
0:56:40 That’s greenlight.com/grayarea to try Greenlight today. Greenlight.com/grayarea.
0:56:46 Vox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zell.
0:56:53 When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images
0:56:57 of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in
0:57:00 the middle of the night, and honestly, that’s not what it is anymore.
0:57:05 That’s Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days,
0:57:11 online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists, and they’re making bank.
0:57:15 Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion.
0:57:22 It’s mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that’s been built to facilitate scamming at scale.
0:57:27 There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world.
0:57:31 These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings.
0:57:35 And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better.
0:57:43 One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed
0:57:48 to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple.
0:57:51 We need to talk to each other.
0:57:55 We need to have those awkward conversations around, what do you do if you have text messages you
0:57:59 don’t recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that’s more
0:58:04 sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam,
0:58:07 but he fell victim, and we have these conversations all the time.
0:58:12 So we are all at risk, and we all need to work together to protect each other.
0:58:18 Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com/zel.
0:58:23 And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust.
0:58:31 Hey there, I’m Ashley C. Ford, an eye host into the mix,
0:58:37 a Ben and Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice, produced with vox creative.
0:58:42 As former president Donald Trump continues to claim, without evidence,
0:58:47 that voter fraud is a key issue in the 2024 presidential election,
0:58:52 we wanted to know, what impact can claims like this have on ordinary voters?
0:58:58 Olivia Coley Pearson, or Ms. Livy as she is known in her community,
0:59:02 comes from a family of proud voters and civil rights activists.
0:59:05 So as an adult, civil service came naturally to her.
0:59:09 In 2012, while she was volunteering at the polls,
0:59:13 a first time voter asked Ms. Livy how the voting machine worked,
0:59:20 and of course, she showed them. Years later, in 2016, Ms. Livy was arrested for voter fraud
0:59:25 because of it. In her mind, this arrest wasn’t about voter fraud,
0:59:30 it was about intimidating black voters. Listen to her story on the first episode
0:59:43 of our new three-part series on Into the Mix, out now.
0:59:48 It feels so wild to say this, but
0:59:55 is it clear by now that Trump is unquestionably the most consequential
1:00:01 political figure of the 21st century so far? Depends on how you calculate these things.
1:00:05 First of all, we don’t know how successful he’ll be at doing those things.
1:00:15 All of the scenarios that I just spun out in that last answer depend on not only Trump and his
1:00:20 team’s willingness to root out people inside the government and replace them with ideologically
1:00:25 motivated people, but all of them being competent enough to deal with the existing roadblocks that
1:00:31 make politically motivated prosecutions difficult. And I don’t know if they have the bureaucratic
1:00:36 or legal competence to do this kind of thing. When you said earlier that you think the system
1:00:41 might hold, I think that’s a big reason why, is tearing down a democracy is really hard.
1:00:46 One thing that I learned from studying Victor Orban in Hungary and writing about him in the
1:00:52 book and just doing a lot of reporting on him in the past several years is that he’s super smart.
1:00:58 He’s a lawyer by training. His inner circle, all lawyers, they all have an intimate knowledge
1:01:04 of how the Hungarian political system works and have been very, very good at finding its weak
1:01:13 points and sticking knives in them. That is a particular kind of talent and skill that I know
1:01:18 Trump personally doesn’t possess and I don’t know how many of his people are going to possess enough
1:01:23 space to be able to succeed in what is unquestionably a much more difficult political environment to
1:01:27 authoritarianize. The Hungarian system was a lot simpler. There were no checks and balances
1:01:31 given that he had a two-thirds majority that could amend the constitution at will. That’s not
1:01:36 how things work here. That’s going to be hard. That will determine a lot of the answer to your
1:01:43 question is Trump, the most significant figure of the 21st century. My view is Trump’s significance
1:01:52 will depend very heavily on how successful he is in his second term at doing what he wants to do,
1:01:57 but I do think you can also make a case that the ideological impact of Trump on American politics
1:02:02 has already been massive and will inaugurate shifts that may well become permanent.
1:02:07 I don’t think there’s any doubt. I guess to bring this around to the question of
1:02:12 where we’re going and what’s next, personally,
1:02:20 my political commitments haven’t changed. I believe in democracy. I’m with John Dewey.
1:02:25 I have faith in ordinary people. If they’re empowered to meaningfully participate in political
1:02:35 life, the way our politics have drifted in the last decade has left me pretty alienated for reasons
1:02:41 I don’t really want to get into at the moment. We don’t have time, but I’m not a both sides
1:02:47 or equivalently bad type. I voted for Harris because Trump doesn’t give a shit about the
1:02:52 constitution and failed the most basic test you can take as a politician in a liberal democracy,
1:02:57 not accepting a peaceful transfer of power in the world the Democratic Party wants to
1:03:03 build remains much closer to the world I want to live in. This wasn’t a hard choice for me.
1:03:09 Still, though, I do wonder where we’re heading and what our politics might look like on the other
1:03:17 side of all of this. Trump is old, very old. There is a shelf life to his political career.
1:03:25 There are people who think our situation will be drastically better the day he leaves and while
1:03:31 I think we’ll be better off when he’s gone. I’m not so sure the political dysfunction
1:03:37 that he’s uncorked will fade away nearly as quickly as people think. What do you think?
1:03:45 Well, I agree with you in brief, but to build on what you’re saying. First, let’s say Trump dies
1:03:53 in office. Then you get President JD Vance who shares very, very similar ideological commitments
1:03:57 to the people who want to tear down American democracy and is, I think, probably one of them
1:04:09 in a lot of ways. So there’s that. The fact that Trumpist politics have paid off in two
1:04:14 presidential elections for Republicans and I just can’t imagine being a Republican strategist right
1:04:21 now and being what we need to do is go back to 2012 because even if all you care about narrowly
1:04:28 is winning elections, then you’re going to try to be Trump rather than the pre-Trump GOP.
1:04:33 There will be a lot of people trying to take up the mantle of Trump’s successor
1:04:37 in the Republican Party and that means doing a lot of the same things that he did.
1:04:41 But can they do them in the way he did them? He is one of one in so many ways.
1:04:48 I’m very skeptical. I’m very skeptical of that. If you look comparatively at authoritarian parties
1:04:56 that work inside democracies, many of them are led by singular charismatic figures. Not all,
1:05:03 but many of the successful ones. There’s this saying in Indian politics that Narendra Modi is
1:05:14 the man who has a 56 inch chest. It’s not literally true, but it’s one of many things that isn’t
1:05:21 about him that his supporters say when you talk to them. This mythologizing and grandiose comments
1:05:30 stem from Modi’s outsized personality and his ability to connect as a figure with supporters
1:05:34 of his party and with a lot of ordinary Indians who might not have supported his party in the
1:05:41 past. I think Trump is much the same way and that appeal, first of all, it’s not invariant.
1:05:45 Like Modi, while he won re-election this year, his party took a major hit. They lost their
1:05:50 parliamentary majority and he’s now in power with the coalition and Trump, of course, lost in 2020.
1:05:57 But second is what happens when it’s gone. We know that this is a huge problem for authoritarian
1:06:03 parties in authoritarian countries. There are often nasty fights over what happens after the
1:06:09 big man dies. That seems equally true in authoritarian factions inside democracies,
1:06:17 because part of what makes them authoritarian is that they put one guy in charge and it’s not clear
1:06:21 who’s next unless you have something like a monarchy where the rules of succession are clear,
1:06:26 but even then who doesn’t know about nasty fights inside monarchies over who is the true heir to
1:06:33 the throne. It’s just a fact of life when you’re not having things settled through a sort of normal
1:06:38 democratic procedure when some politics come so oriented around one person to an outsized degree.
1:06:48 So I just don’t know what’s going to happen after Trump is gone. I can guess and I think a lot will
1:06:58 depend on how his administration manages American public opinion. Not only did Trump end his presidency
1:07:04 historically unpopular, but even now he’s unpopular. He just won an election and as a figure,
1:07:11 he is an unpopular candidate. There’s a lot of people who really don’t like him and many of the
1:07:15 swing voters could be turned off by things that happened during his presidency, especially if
1:07:19 it’s as disruptive as it seems like it might be to ordinary people’s lives.
1:07:22 Yeah, and maybe this goes back to the legacy question a little bit or the question of his
1:07:30 ultimate impact. I mean, I don’t know either. I just know he broke a lot of things that cannot be
1:07:37 fixed very easily. I mean, you talk about the legacy of Nietzsche on the reactionary right
1:07:40 towards the end of the book, which obviously triggered me a little bit.
1:07:46 It was written for you, Sean. I should have written that. This is the Sean section of the book.
1:07:55 I felt very seen. But Nietzsche definitely was not a fan of democracy, but man, any anti-democratic
1:08:00 movement with Trump as its face is so far from what Nietzsche would have championed,
1:08:05 the anti-intellectualism, the petty narcissism, the worshiping of money for its own sake. I mean,
1:08:10 he is the pleasure-seeking decadent Nietzsche thought democratic cultures would inevitably
1:08:16 produce. But the one Nietzschean thing about him, which is what we’ve been talking about here, is that
1:08:23 he is dynamite. He has a way of blowing everything up, and that’s something Nietzsche would have
1:08:31 appreciated. But what worries me is that there just doesn’t seem to be much else there. There’s
1:08:38 no real ideas, no new values, no vision of the future. It’s just all the worst excesses and
1:08:45 pathologies of our culture taken to their logical end point. And I don’t know where that leads us,
1:08:50 except staring at the abyss, I guess, to stick with the Nietzsche themes.
1:08:57 Yeah, except now, not only is the abyss staring back, it’s almost in reverse, right? We’re staring
1:09:00 up at the abyss, and the abyss is staring down from its commanding heights of the federal government.
1:09:12 Kind of twist the metaphor past the point of breaking, but the one thing that I will say
1:09:20 that’s hopeful to counter the depressing sentiment that you just outlined is that I really believe,
1:09:27 and even after this election, I really believe this, that most people in the United States and
1:09:34 in other democracies still want to live in a democracy. Again and again, they say it, polls
1:09:41 show it, that the alternatives don’t poll very well. They force people to act within its confines,
1:09:49 and when they stray too far, there tends to be a popular backlash. I think the 2024 election is
1:09:54 just another in a long list of trans ideological, like it’s not just like one side is being punished,
1:10:00 but trans ideological backlashes against a status quo that people don’t like for certain reasons,
1:10:06 but there’s a limit to how much people hate the status quo. There are things that you can do to
1:10:11 break it, and if there’s anything, anything that’s been clear about American politics in the past
1:10:15 few years, it’s that when you do things, when you try something ambitious, people punish you for it.
1:10:22 What happened after Obamacare? Obama suffered an extraordinary wipeout. The Democrats did more
1:10:27 precisely in the 2010 midterm elections, and there’s good evidence that Democratic candidates who
1:10:35 voted for Obamacare suffered more because voters didn’t like that change was happening. Now,
1:10:40 Obamacare is incredibly popular to the point where Republicans are debating whether or not
1:10:44 they should try to ever repeal it again at all. They talk about it, and Mike Johnson said something
1:10:48 that sounded like he wanted to repeal Obamacare, and then he walked it back immediately because
1:10:51 what you’re doing is threatening to take people’s health care away. You’re threatening to disrupt
1:10:57 the status quo in a radical way, and that status quo bias is very real, and it exists at the same
1:11:03 time as anti-incumbent sentiment, which is a weird thing to think about. People are both unhappy
1:11:07 with the way that things are, and then really unhappy when you try to change some of the things
1:11:12 that are the way things are. I wouldn’t call it especially coherent, but it is a kind of conservative
1:11:17 safeguard on democracy that if Trump pushes too hard too fast to try to break some stuff,
1:11:20 there will be a real reckoning with the American public.
1:11:27 I hope so, and the optimistic case you make at the end of the book is pretty persuasive to me,
1:11:30 even though my instincts are want to push me in the opposite direction.
1:11:31 To me, bleak.
1:11:37 It’s a good point that we are still all sort of playing this fundamental language game of democracy.
1:11:42 Even the GOP, which as a party, I think it’s just objectively less committed to liberal
1:11:47 democracy than the Democrats, they still feel compelled to cloak their appeals in the language
1:11:53 of democracy, and that does say something about how secure we are in the ideological confines
1:12:02 of liberal democracy. I will say, the thing I struggle with in that last chapter is the argument
1:12:09 about how effective it can be telling voters that they need to defend democracy. I don’t know how
1:12:16 much it matters in the way we think it matters. And like I said earlier, I think Americans in
1:12:22 particular are incredibly privileged, and many people knowingly or not take stability for granted,
1:12:27 and democracy is just an abstraction. And having never lived in a non-democracy, people are just
1:12:32 not as worried as they should be about losing one. I have been thinking about this question
1:12:38 a lot since those exit polls that you referred to and the outcome of the election
1:12:43 are definitely not ones that vindicate my arguments that you should be making the political case
1:12:49 about democracy in the way that I think the 2022 election results strongly vindicated that as an
1:12:57 argument, or at least was very consistent with that. What I think is that not every election
1:13:04 is going to be about the things you want it to be about. It just isn’t the case that even if you
1:13:07 objectively are correct that democracy is on the line, that that’s going to be the issue that
1:13:13 registers with voters in this particular election. And that’s in part because, second, it’s a little
1:13:20 bit harder to say democracy is on the ballot when you’re the party in power. Not impossible. Again,
1:13:26 2022 was easier, but there wasn’t the countervailing pressure of someone like Donald Trump who’s
1:13:32 capable of ginning up a lot of support, which leads me to three, which is that one of the most
1:13:36 effective tactics for any authoritarian party to pull right now is to claim the mantle of
1:13:42 true democracy and to blame the other party for not being really democratic and not succeeding in.
1:13:52 And regardless of the strength of that case, it can really resonate with people. And so the push
1:13:59 and pull of a lot of arguments now in a society where democracy is in trouble is who can do a
1:14:09 better job making the case that their side is to blame or that getting their voters more riled up
1:14:13 about this particular issue. And in this election for a constellation of reasons,
1:14:17 I think primarily orienting around anti-income and sentiment, Republicans had an easier time
1:14:21 with their version of the argument, even though clearly they’re the party that’s more threatening
1:14:28 to democracy. Things will be different in future elections, especially if Trump acts in the way
1:14:34 that I think he will. Like I said in the book, that this tactic succeeds primarily when you can
1:14:41 point to a contrast between their pro-democratic rhetoric, the claims to be standing for democracy,
1:14:48 and actual behavior that is itself anti-democratic. And that’s easier when somebody’s in power and
1:14:54 actually doing said anti-democratic things. Trump’s, he’s out of power and a lot of people
1:15:01 don’t remember what things were like in 2019. Next time around, 2026, 2028, as long as we still have
1:15:06 relatively fair and functional elections, which I think we probably will, the fact that I have to
1:15:14 caveat was probably is disturbing, but I think we’re likely to. Voters will be seeing what Trump
1:15:20 has to offer. And I just have a hard time believing that Democrats won’t be better able to make this
1:15:26 case next time around, given the objective changes to reality. I think they will. And I think there’ll
1:15:34 be a thermostatic reaction in the other direction. It has been very instructive for me. I live in
1:15:41 Southern Mississippi at the moment, which is obviously a Trump stronghold. And I can’t tell
1:15:47 you how many people I know who, if you ask them to straight up, what’s more concerning to you?
1:15:53 A gallon of milk being 72 cents higher than it was five years ago or president of the United
1:15:59 States refusing a peaceful transfer of power. The answer is the milk, dude. And that may be
1:16:03 because they don’t really believe anything will truly destroy the American system. But even in
1:16:07 that case, it speaks to my point about the background assumption that our democracy will
1:16:14 just keep humming along forever, no matter what we do or who we elect. And that is a problem,
1:16:19 I think, a very big problem. I agree. The way I’ve been thinking about this since the election
1:16:26 is that people lack a tragic imagination. The ability to think what happens if something changes
1:16:32 in a way that you lose so much that you’re taken for granted. And people just can’t,
1:16:37 they can’t conceptualize of something that fundamental being broken. Because it’s so
1:16:42 outside the realm of their own experience. It sounds like catastrophizing to talk about it.
1:16:46 And then it happens. And then you quickly adjust and live in the new reality,
1:16:52 but it’s forever changed. I do think it would be better if horrible
1:16:56 shit didn’t have to happen in order for us to course correct.
1:17:04 And I will say, look, I do, I think you make a good case in the book that
1:17:12 we still have every reason to believe that liberal democracy will hold. And frankly,
1:17:16 believing that to be true is probably essential to making it happen.
1:17:24 And that alone is all the justification we need, really. So there’s my optimism.
1:17:27 There’s your optimism. And I appreciate that shot.
1:17:34 Zach Beechamp, this is a long time coming, man. I’m really glad we finally got you on the show.
1:17:40 Please go check out Zach’s terrific book, The Reactionary Spirit. And you should also go check
1:17:44 out his terrific newsletter called On The Right. We’ll drop a link in the show notes.
1:17:57 Zach Beechamp, thanks buddy. Thank you. This has been great.
1:18:09 All right, I hope you found that episode useful. I’ll just say I went into this conversation thinking
1:18:16 there are no simple answers to what just happened. And I feel even more strongly about that now.
1:18:25 But there’s a tendency on the left to dismiss what just happened as some kind of rupture
1:18:32 of democracy. But Trump won the popular vote in a free and fair election.
1:18:40 So whatever we think about how he might govern, that’s democracy. And that’s worth remembering.
1:18:48 Anyway, as always, we do want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area at
1:18:53 box.com. And then please rate, review, and subscribe to the show if you haven’t already.
1:19:01 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Travis Larchuck, edited by Jorge Just,
1:19:07 engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Anouk Dussault, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
1:19:12 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.
1:19:18 The show is part of Vox. Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
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1:19:48 I’m Ashley C. Ford, and I host Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice
1:19:54 produced with Vox Creative. We’re back with new episodes, taking a look at voter fraud,
1:20:00 specifically how the fear of voter fraud accusations can lead to voter suppression.
1:20:06 As the 2024 election draws nearer, former President Donald Trump continues to claim
1:20:13 without evidence that widespread voter fraud lost him the election in 2020. So we wanted to know,
1:20:19 how do claims like this affect ordinary voters? Here’s the story of a civil servant who faced
1:20:26 felony charges and hears in prison for helping a first-time voter figure out how to use a voting
1:20:31 machine. That story and more on Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry’s podcast.
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