0:00:06 Hey everybody, I’m Ashley C. Ford and I’m the host of Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry’s podcast
0:00:13 about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative. And in our new mini-series, we’re talking about
0:00:19 voter fraud. For years now, former President Donald Trump has made it a key talking point,
0:00:25 despite there being no evidence of widespread fraud. But what impact do claims like these have
0:00:32 on ordinary voters? People like Olivia Coley-Piersen, a civil servant in Douglas, Georgia,
0:00:37 who was arrested for voter fraud because she showed a first-time voter how the voting machines
0:00:44 worked. Hear how she fought back on the latest episode of Into the Mix. Subscribe now wherever you listen.
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0:01:01 are from all the times you spent with your partner. And as you start planning 2025, maybe, just maybe,
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0:01:15 Blue Nile. Right now, you can go to bluenile.com and use code gray area for $50 off your purchase
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.
1:19:31 Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
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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0:01:19 The episode you’re about to hear
0:01:22 was recorded a couple of weeks ago.
0:01:25 We obviously knew the election was around the corner,
0:01:29 and the idea at the time was that we’d all
0:01:31 be drowning in politics, and we wanted
0:01:36 to do a show that felt like a break from all of that.
0:01:39 So we had a conversation with a philosopher
0:01:44 about the philosophy of awkwardness and awkward situations,
0:01:48 and that’s the episode you’re about to hear today.
0:01:50 Because in the days after the election,
0:01:53 one of the things that’s really come through
0:01:56 is that things are going to get awkward.
0:01:59 Half of this country voted for a totally different vision
0:02:01 of the world than the other half,
0:02:05 but 100% of the country feels very certain that the vision
0:02:09 they have is the right one.
0:02:12 We’re living in a situation that nobody really
0:02:14 knows how to navigate, and the rules
0:02:18 for how to be in this world are pretty unclear,
0:02:20 and that is an awkward situation.
0:02:23 And as we settle into this world, as we
0:02:27 go to Thanksgiving and end of year holidays and New Year’s
0:02:30 parties with people we love who live
0:02:32 in a different world from us, it’s
0:02:34 going to feel even more awkward.
0:02:38 We’re going to mess up.
0:02:41 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:44 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:02:58 Today’s guest is Alexandra Plakius.
0:03:01 She’s a philosopher at Hamilton College
0:03:05 and the author of the book Awkwardness of Theory.
0:03:07 I’ve always loved it when philosophers
0:03:10 tackle practical everyday problems.
0:03:13 Usually the sort of problems we might assume
0:03:17 are unworthy of serious philosophical inquiry.
0:03:22 This book by Plakius is a great example of this.
0:03:26 She takes something we all think we understand, awkwardness,
0:03:30 and redefines it in a way that changes how you think about it,
0:03:34 or at least it changed how I think about it.
0:03:37 For Plakius, there are no awkward people
0:03:41 because awkwardness isn’t a personality trait.
0:03:44 Instead, it’s a kind of social property.
0:03:47 It’s what happens when the unofficial scripts governing
0:03:51 our social life collapse, which is why she
0:03:55 argues that only situations, not people, can be awkward.
0:04:06 Alexandra Plakius, welcome to the show.
0:04:08 Thanks so much for having me.
0:04:11 You have an interesting philosophical background.
0:04:17 You study moral psychology and the cultural foundations
0:04:19 of values and that sort of thing.
0:04:24 How did you end up writing a book about awkwardness?
0:04:27 So I think first, as a philosopher,
0:04:30 any time you come across a topic that it seems not
0:04:32 that many people have written them out,
0:04:34 there’s always a little bit of a thrill there.
0:04:39 But really, I think I was interested in awkwardness
0:04:42 because as a moral philosopher, I’m often
0:04:44 spending my time talking to students about life or death
0:04:47 dilemmas, whether to pull the switch on the trolley
0:04:50 so it hits one person instead of five.
0:04:53 But hopefully, most of my students
0:04:55 will never actually be in that situation.
0:04:58 On the other hand, there are all of these daily moments
0:05:01 of discomfort and awkwardness and things
0:05:03 like that that philosophers don’t often
0:05:04 talk that much about.
0:05:07 And there’s almost a sense that we shouldn’t really
0:05:08 care too much about that.
0:05:10 We should be above that.
0:05:12 We should be living the life of the mind.
0:05:14 But we live in a social world and those social issues
0:05:15 matter to us.
0:05:16 So I think I was attracted to the idea
0:05:19 of digging a little deeper into the kinds of everyday
0:05:22 interactions that we will encounter in our lives
0:05:25 and how we navigate them and why they matter.
0:05:31 And yet there is a good bit of serious philosophical work
0:05:36 on topics like anxiety, depression, loneliness,
0:05:37 those sorts of things.
0:05:42 But very little, as far as I can tell, on awkwardness.
0:05:44 Have any theories on why that is?
0:05:47 I think the main reason is that awkwardness
0:05:50 has typically been assimilated to discussions
0:05:53 of embarrassment and shame to the extent
0:05:54 that it’s really discussed at all.
0:05:57 Even there, it gets surprisingly little attention.
0:06:01 So the scholar William Miller has a book on humiliation.
0:06:02 And if you look at his index, he’s
0:06:06 got more entries for axe murder than he does for awkwardness.
0:06:08 So awkwardness– yeah, you’re right.
0:06:10 It gets surprisingly little attention,
0:06:12 even as philosophers have turned their attention
0:06:16 to particular emotions and particular negative emotions.
0:06:18 Well, let’s get into it.
0:06:25 Awkwardness is normally defined as a personal problem
0:06:29 or a personality trait.
0:06:31 Or sometimes, as you just said, it’s basically
0:06:33 a synonym for embarrassment.
0:06:36 And these are all understandings that you challenge.
0:06:39 So tell me how you define awkwardness.
0:06:44 And maybe just as importantly, tell me what you think it isn’t.
0:06:44 Right.
0:06:47 So starting with what it isn’t, I don’t think
0:06:49 awkwardness is a personal problem.
0:06:51 I don’t think awkwardness is a personal trait.
0:06:54 One of the things I was surprised by in writing this book
0:06:58 is how quickly people were willing to tell me
0:07:01 I’m really awkward or oh, I’m so excited to read your book
0:07:03 as a very awkward person.
0:07:05 It’s something that a lot of people are willing and even
0:07:07 eager to self-identify with.
0:07:09 But I actually think that’s a mistake.
0:07:10 I don’t think people are awkward.
0:07:12 I think situations are awkward.
0:07:14 On my view, awkwardness is something
0:07:18 that happens in a situation when we lack the social resources
0:07:20 we need to guide us through it.
0:07:22 And so interactions become awkward
0:07:25 when we’re uncertain what kind of interaction we’re in,
0:07:27 what our role in that interaction is,
0:07:29 what the other person’s role is, when
0:07:32 we’re unable to coordinate on a social script
0:07:33 to get us through it.
0:07:36 So in that sense, awkwardness is not a personal problem.
0:07:38 It’s an us problem.
0:07:44 But surely some people are more or less awkward than others,
0:07:46 right, even if it’s generally true that there
0:07:50 are no awkward people, only awkward situations.
0:07:52 So I think there’s an interesting ambiguity
0:07:55 when we describe people as awkward between meaning
0:07:59 that person feels awkward or they make me feel awkward.
0:08:01 So if I say, like, Sean is awkward at parties,
0:08:04 I might mean Sean makes me feel awkward when he’s at parties,
0:08:07 or I might mean Sean feels awkward at parties.
0:08:09 I do think that you’re right.
0:08:11 Some people read social cues differently,
0:08:14 and some people might have a difficult time
0:08:16 triangulating on the kind of social cues that most of us
0:08:18 rely on every day.
0:08:21 Some people also just give social cues differently, right?
0:08:24 So some people might be less inclined to make eye contact.
0:08:27 Or if you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with someone
0:08:30 whose conversational timing is just a little off
0:08:33 and you’re not sure when you’re supposed to break in, right?
0:08:36 Is that a pause that’s an invitation?
0:08:37 Is it a pause that’s a hesitation?
0:08:40 That can feel really awkward, right?
0:08:43 But that feeling of awkwardness doesn’t necessarily
0:08:46 tell us something about that person’s character.
0:08:49 It might just mean that we need to adjust our own social cues.
0:08:53 Or it might mean that we’re in a kind of situation for which we
0:08:56 really haven’t figured out the social norms yet.
0:09:00 Even if it’s true that maybe some people
0:09:04 have more difficulties navigating social interactions
0:09:07 than others, you still think it’s the case, right,
0:09:13 that labeling them awkward obscures more than it reveals.
0:09:14 That’s right.
0:09:16 I think labeling people as awkward is
0:09:20 unhelpful both in terms of the reason I just mentioned
0:09:25 that there’s that ambiguity there about where the awkwardness is.
0:09:28 I think also it obscures what’s interesting about awkwardness,
0:09:32 which is the way it can highlight gaps in our social scripts,
0:09:34 in our social norms, in our social resources.
0:09:37 So if I just blame you for the awkwardness that
0:09:40 arises at the party, I might be missing an opportunity
0:09:43 to reflect on my own behavior or on the norms governing
0:09:45 our social interaction.
0:09:46 One of the things I talk about in the book
0:09:49 is the way that labeling someone awkward
0:09:54 can also intersect with our social scripts around gender
0:09:57 and power and privilege in such a way that when an interaction
0:10:00 becomes uncomfortable, labeling one person as awkward
0:10:02 is often a way to offload responsibility
0:10:04 for that discomfort.
0:10:07 When I think of awkwardness, or at least
0:10:09 when I thought of it before reading your book,
0:10:15 your book basically did persuade me to think of it differently.
0:10:18 When I thought of awkwardness, I would think immediately
0:10:23 of fear, fear of interacting with other people.
0:10:26 But that implies a kind of misanthropy, right?
0:10:30 So if you’re awkward, that means you must just not like people
0:10:34 and get weirdly uncomfortable around them.
0:10:37 But you really think that’s not only not true,
0:10:41 but it’s actually harmful, right?
0:10:44 I hadn’t really thought about the intersection between awkwardness
0:10:45 and fear per se.
0:10:47 I do think there’s an intersection between awkwardness
0:10:49 and anxiety and social anxiety in particular.
0:10:52 And I think one reason people sometimes label themselves
0:10:55 as awkward, there’s some research suggesting
0:10:58 that this is a strategy to manage social anxiety, almost
0:11:01 a way of saying, don’t expect too much for me
0:11:04 in the social domain, I’m a very awkward person.
0:11:07 But I think what’s interesting is that in other cases,
0:11:09 people who we would tend to perceive as awkward
0:11:13 may not experience their own behavior in a negative way
0:11:16 or may not experience these social interactions
0:11:17 in a negative way, right?
0:11:19 It may be that the social cues they’re giving off
0:11:21 make us feel awkward, but they’re not
0:11:23 having any kind of negative experience.
0:11:25 I do think we fear awkwardness a lot.
0:11:28 I think that we are surprisingly afraid of awkwardness.
0:11:31 And another reason I was interested in studying it
0:11:33 was because I was interested in the ways
0:11:35 that awkwardness or the fear of awkwardness
0:11:39 inhibits us from engaging in certain kinds of conversations
0:11:44 and criticism of others and examinations of our own behavior.
0:11:47 And I think there are a lot of cases where we should act,
0:11:49 we know we should act, and we don’t
0:11:51 because we’re afraid of making things awkward.
0:11:54 After the #MeToo movement, there was an interview
0:11:57 with men about sexual harassment in the workplace.
0:12:00 And you would find men saying things like, well,
0:12:03 I knew my co-worker’s behavior wasn’t OK,
0:12:05 and I knew I should say something.
0:12:08 But I was afraid of making things awkward if I spoke up.
0:12:10 And on the one hand, that’s really puzzling.
0:12:14 Like, your co-workers are engaging in sexual harassment.
0:12:15 That’s not OK.
0:12:16 You know that.
0:12:19 That’s a moral obligation to speak up and do something.
0:12:24 Why would you let something as seemingly
0:12:29 minor as some social discomfort inhibit you from speaking up?
0:12:33 But I think awkwardness exerts a really powerful force on us.
0:12:37 Yeah, I’ll bracket the question of when you’re in situations
0:12:39 where there’s an obvious power imbalance.
0:12:42 But just in general, the fear part.
0:12:44 I mean, for me, awkwardness, at least a lot of it
0:12:50 is about this experience of uncertainty, which
0:12:52 is a panic inducing thing for a lot of people.
0:12:54 And I’ll count myself among them.
0:12:56 I mean, maybe panic is a strong word,
0:13:00 but I’ve never been super comfortable with uncertainty.
0:13:03 And to the extent I’ve never really
0:13:07 presented as awkward in social settings,
0:13:09 I think it’s mostly because I’m pretty good at performing
0:13:10 in that way.
0:13:13 But that discomfort is there all the time,
0:13:15 right underneath the mask.
0:13:18 What is it about uncertainty in social settings
0:13:22 that’s so unnerving, even when the stakes are low?
0:13:25 Like, what the hell are we afraid of, really?
0:13:26 That’s such a great point.
0:13:28 And I think that one of the things awkwardness can
0:13:31 highlight for us is, first, how reliant we
0:13:33 are on everyday social cues to get through things.
0:13:36 I think that we often don’t notice
0:13:38 the kind of social scaffolding that
0:13:41 goes into our interactions, because it’s just mostly there,
0:13:42 right?
0:13:44 But when it’s absent, all of a sudden,
0:13:47 it is like the floor is pulled out from under us.
0:13:48 And we have that almost that moment
0:13:51 where you go off a cliff and your legs are circling in the air.
0:13:53 And it is this feeling of panic.
0:13:55 And I think part of that is we seem
0:13:58 to have an expectation that socializing
0:14:01 should be effortless, that the ability
0:14:03 to move through the world and social interactions
0:14:06 and present yourself in public is something everyone just kind
0:14:08 of knows how to do without instruction,
0:14:11 and that your ability to do it is really a measure of you
0:14:12 as a person.
0:14:15 But when you think about it, that’s kind of puzzling.
0:14:19 Like, we have all of these various roles we inhabit
0:14:19 throughout the day.
0:14:22 We are put into new situations all the time.
0:14:24 We’re meeting new people.
0:14:25 That’s hard.
0:14:27 That’s complicated, right?
0:14:31 And so I think part of why I think
0:14:32 it’s a mistake to think about awkwardness
0:14:35 as an individual problem is that it’s
0:14:38 OK to need help navigating social interactions.
0:14:41 It’s OK not to know how to behave in a social setting.
0:14:44 And I think once we move past that expectation that this
0:14:45 is something everyone should know,
0:14:48 we might stop fearing uncertainty so much,
0:14:50 because that uncertainty no longer
0:14:52 threatens to unmask us, right?
0:14:55 It’s OK not to know how to behave at this kind of party.
0:14:58 It’s OK not to know what to call your professor
0:14:59 on the first day of class.
0:15:00 You can just ask.
0:15:04 And I think the more we admit that sometimes socializing
0:15:06 is hard and it’s OK to be uncertain,
0:15:10 then maybe the less threatening that uncertainty will seem.
0:15:11 I have never heard it put this way,
0:15:15 but I do like thinking of awkwardness
0:15:18 as a form of disorientation.
0:15:21 I mean, I like this idea that the essence of awkwardness
0:15:26 is really just being lost in a situation.
0:15:28 I’ve just never heard it frame that way.
0:15:30 But once you start seeing it through that lens,
0:15:33 it does change the way you think about it.
0:15:33 Right.
0:15:36 And I think this is another part of the kind of shift
0:15:38 from thinking about it as an individual issue
0:15:41 is when we see it as a navigation failure,
0:15:43 we might be less likely to blame ourselves for it.
0:15:45 And we might be more likely to think about, well,
0:15:48 what can we do next time to avoid that awkward situation?
0:15:51 What do we need in our navigational resources?
0:15:55 I think we both used the word embarrassment a few minutes ago.
0:15:58 But another word that often gets mixed up with awkwardness
0:16:00 is cringe.
0:16:04 And you write that our awkward moments are not cringe-worthy.
0:16:09 So what is the difference between awkward and cringy?
0:16:12 So I think there’s cringe in the sense
0:16:15 that people use it now sort of online.
0:16:19 I think cringe in the sense of like that cringing feeling
0:16:22 you have, cringing is retrospective.
0:16:24 It’s what happens when you look back on something.
0:16:26 And I know we all probably have those moments.
0:16:28 Some of them are just decades old,
0:16:31 where all it takes like one second of thinking about it
0:16:35 before you’re literally curling into a ball just wanting
0:16:37 to shrink inside yourself.
0:16:38 That’s cringing.
0:16:40 And cringing comes when we look back
0:16:43 on moments of awkwardness often, or moments of shame,
0:16:45 or moments of embarrassment.
0:16:47 And I think that the reason we associate cringing
0:16:49 and awkwardness is because we think
0:16:52 about our awkward moments as something shameful.
0:16:55 We think about them as something we should be ashamed of
0:16:56 or embarrassed about.
0:16:59 But notice that the cringing is a different response.
0:17:02 It’s a kind of after-the-fact response to awkwardness,
0:17:04 but it’s different from the awkwardness itself.
0:17:06 When you are in the middle of awkwardness,
0:17:08 you’re not really– you’re almost frozen, right?
0:17:09 You’re not cringing.
0:17:11 You’re not really doing anything.
0:17:13 It’s only when you kind of like stop and reflect
0:17:15 and notice the awkwardness later,
0:17:17 that’s when the cringe kicks in.
0:17:21 Why do you think some people are just more sensitive to
0:17:25 or attuned to that lack of a social script
0:17:29 and other people just seem to not notice it as much
0:17:30 or maybe not even care as much?
0:17:34 And therefore, maybe they don’t experience that awkwardness
0:17:38 in the way the other person does.
0:17:39 Right, that’s a great question.
0:17:41 I think that it’s tempting to envy those people
0:17:44 who don’t feel awkward about things,
0:17:47 but it’s also helpful to remember
0:17:49 that part of the reason we feel awkward
0:17:52 is because we care about being attuned to other people.
0:17:54 We care about being in sync with other people
0:17:57 and we care about other people’s responses to us.
0:17:59 And so in that sense, awkwardness is,
0:18:01 I think, related to empathy,
0:18:05 related to all of our pro-social characteristics.
0:18:08 I think it can go too far in the sense of self-consciousness
0:18:09 and self-monitoring.
0:18:11 And I think that there are moments
0:18:13 where we don’t feel awkward
0:18:16 because we’re just so in the flow
0:18:19 that those moments where you kind of lose yourself
0:18:21 in an interaction or an activity
0:18:22 and you don’t have time to feel self-conscious,
0:18:25 you don’t have time to think about what you’re doing.
0:18:27 As far as individual differences in feeling awkward,
0:18:29 I definitely think that’s true.
0:18:31 And I think that part of it is probably
0:18:34 a personality trait kind of thing.
0:18:36 I think there may be people who genuinely
0:18:38 don’t feel awkward at all ever
0:18:40 and I am a little afraid of those people.
0:18:44 And I think those people worry me maybe a little bit.
0:18:47 But I think there are also people who could probably do
0:18:49 with feeling a little bit less awkward.
0:18:52 And I think some of that has to do with how we see ourselves
0:18:56 as responsible for other people’s comfort
0:18:58 and how we are assigned responsibility
0:19:02 for other people’s comfort by social norms around gender
0:19:04 and privilege and things like that.
0:19:06 – So you’re saying if somebody doesn’t feel awkwardness ever,
0:19:10 they’re either the coolest person in history
0:19:13 of the world or a complete sociopath?
0:19:15 – I guess I had in mind more the latter.
0:19:18 But it could be the former.
0:19:21 I do think that we can probably think of people,
0:19:22 probably everyone can think of someone
0:19:24 who just has that kind of charisma
0:19:27 and who doesn’t seem to feel ill at ease
0:19:30 and who also seems to be able to put others at ease.
0:19:31 And I think that question of charisma
0:19:33 is a really interesting one.
0:19:34 And that’s something that I would love
0:19:36 to look more into in the future.
0:19:39 I think some of it is like a kind of social confidence
0:19:41 and a kind of social grace.
0:19:43 Throughout different cultures and history,
0:19:46 people have always admired that performance
0:19:48 of effortlessness, right?
0:19:50 And I think that’s supposed to be the mark
0:19:53 of social status and confidence
0:19:55 is just having that kind of social capital
0:19:59 and being able to seem at ease in any situation.
0:20:01 – Do we have a good sense of whether or not more
0:20:06 and more people are self-identifying as awkward?
0:20:09 Are the trend lines clear in either direction here?
0:20:13 Because my guess would be
0:20:15 that digital technology in particular
0:20:18 is making more people think of themselves as awkward
0:20:20 because we don’t socialize in real life
0:20:21 as often as we used to.
0:20:24 And so when we do have to actually go out into the world
0:20:27 with other people, we’re less comfortable,
0:20:28 less certain of what to do.
0:20:31 And I imagine that would increase
0:20:34 the experience of awkwardness.
0:20:35 – Yeah, that’s an interesting question.
0:20:37 And I don’t have data for you on that.
0:20:40 I can say that one of the things I found
0:20:42 when I was researching the book,
0:20:44 there’s a lot of like articles online
0:20:47 and media coverage suggesting like,
0:20:49 “Oh, we live in this golden age of awkwardness
0:20:51 “or we live in really awkward times.”
0:20:54 But you can find articles going back like 100 years
0:20:55 saying the same thing.
0:20:58 And there was, I found, it came across a Life Magazine letter
0:21:02 that began telling the story of an encounter
0:21:03 in like a restaurant.
0:21:05 And they were saying, “We live in awkward times.”
0:21:06 And I was in a tea shop
0:21:09 and the waiter or the server went over to a customer
0:21:12 and said, “Excuse me, sir, I mean, madam, I mean, sir,
0:21:13 “I mean, madam.”
0:21:15 And this observation that like,
0:21:16 “Oh, we live in really awkward times.
0:21:19 “You’re not sure which pronoun to use for someone.”
0:21:21 It just feels so contemporary.
0:21:23 And so in some sense, I think that
0:21:25 as long as social norms have been in flux
0:21:27 and there’s been room for uncertainty
0:21:29 about what social norms were in play,
0:21:31 there’s room for awkwardness.
0:21:34 – What do you think are the most frequently
0:21:39 awkward experiences that people have in their everyday lives?
0:21:40 – So if you ask people this,
0:21:43 one of the most common awkward experiences people cite
0:21:46 is clogging up someone’s toilet
0:21:48 when you’re a guest in their house,
0:21:53 accidentally sending a message to the group chat
0:21:55 that is about someone in the group chat.
0:21:57 So being kind of outed as gossiping
0:22:00 about a group chat member in that very chat.
0:22:03 Those are what people will say if you ask them
0:22:06 what are the most awkward experiences you can imagine.
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0:25:41 (gentle music)
0:25:43 (gentle music)
0:25:56 – I’ve got a question for you.
0:25:57 – Sure.
0:26:00 – As a resident awkwardness expert.
0:26:03 So I’m a podcaster.
0:26:06 I talk into the mic for a living,
0:26:11 but I hate the sound of my own voice.
0:26:16 And when I listen to my recordings alone,
0:26:17 I don’t like it.
0:26:19 I think it’s terrible.
0:26:21 I wanna turn it off, but it’s not awkward
0:26:23 because I’m alone.
0:26:27 But if I’m in the car with my family
0:26:28 and they turn my pod on,
0:26:32 or if I walk into a room and someone is listening
0:26:34 to my show, it’s awkward.
0:26:37 Because now it’s a social situation.
0:26:41 Now I’m worried about how I’m being seen by others.
0:26:44 But is this actually a case of awkwardness
0:26:45 as you understand it?
0:26:48 Is there a lack of a social script here?
0:26:53 Or am I just being neurotic and embarrassed?
0:26:57 But that’s not quite the same thing as awkwardness.
0:27:01 – Well, the bad news is you can be neurotic, embarrassed
0:27:03 and awkward all at the same time.
0:27:04 – Sweet.
0:27:09 – So yeah, I think that there is some awkwardness there
0:27:12 in that we may not always be great at knowing how to act
0:27:16 when our own voice is being played in front of other people.
0:27:18 So there might be a little bit of self-consciousness there
0:27:21 and a little bit of uncertainty about like, yeah,
0:27:24 how to act and what we’re supposed to do or say
0:27:26 or acknowledge or not acknowledge.
0:27:29 So one thing I’ve realized since the book came out is
0:27:33 I’m really awkward when people congratulate me on the book
0:27:36 or say, you know, oh, I saw your book on such and such
0:27:39 and I just don’t know what to say or do.
0:27:42 And I start to feel really awkward
0:27:44 and the interaction becomes awkward.
0:27:46 And I think that’s just a matter of feeling
0:27:50 maybe a little uncomfortable with our own standing
0:27:51 or status in those interactions.
0:27:53 Like what’s my role here?
0:27:54 What am I supposed to do?
0:27:56 You know, a lot of people can just say thanks and stop
0:27:57 and that’s it.
0:27:59 You might find yourself making a joke
0:28:02 to deflect your own embarrassment or awkwardness
0:28:03 in those situations.
0:28:07 And I think humor is a tool that we turn to a lot.
0:28:10 – Oh, my move is just to preemptively shit on myself
0:28:14 before anyone else can do it and it kind of neutralizes.
0:28:15 – Well, that works too.
0:28:18 And notice like that, I’m not saying that’s the best move.
0:28:21 I’m not necessarily recommending it, but it does work.
0:28:24 And I think one thing it does is it gives you a go-to move
0:28:27 and then it gives someone else like a next line, right?
0:28:30 Which is like, no, no, you sound great or no,
0:28:31 I love the episode.
0:28:34 So it kind of helps everyone out by setting the tone.
0:28:37 Like this is gonna be a self-deprecating interaction
0:28:38 and now your role is to reassure me
0:28:40 that I’m not shit, right?
0:28:46 – Why saying goodbye at parties so damn awkward?
0:28:47 That can’t be just for me, right?
0:28:51 I mean, that has to be pretty frequently cited
0:28:53 awkward experience, yeah?
0:28:56 – You know, a formative childhood experience was waiting
0:28:57 for my parents to say goodbye at parties
0:28:59 to like 20 million people.
0:29:00 So I just leave.
0:29:03 So I can’t really tell you for sure.
0:29:04 If I could solve that one.
0:29:07 Yeah, I’m just a quick wave to the room and I’m out.
0:29:10 – That’s the thing.
0:29:11 The old Irish goodbye.
0:29:12 I mean, that’s probably,
0:29:16 see if I was cooler, I would do that because a problem.
0:29:18 You know, you have those moments where you’re saying bye
0:29:22 to someone and again, again, I’m someone,
0:29:24 I have a lot of self chatter, self talk, right?
0:29:27 So you’re saying bye and you’re thinking,
0:29:29 wait a minute, are we shaking hands here?
0:29:30 Are we gonna hug it out?
0:29:32 Are we fist bumping?
0:29:35 We’re just gonna do a calm, cool nod.
0:29:37 It’s saying goodbye even necessary at all.
0:29:39 And it’s awkward because you don’t know
0:29:40 what’s in the script here.
0:29:43 And you don’t wanna guess wrong
0:29:47 because then you are embarrassed and it’s awkward.
0:29:48 – Yeah, I mean, there’s, you know,
0:29:51 a classic awkward moment is like, I go in for the hug,
0:29:53 the other person’s looking for a handshake
0:29:55 and it can get, that’s so awkward.
0:29:58 But I think also we’re identifying part
0:30:00 of your problem here, which is not just you,
0:30:03 but a lot of people have this kind of inner monologue
0:30:06 that involves second guessing and kind of monitoring
0:30:07 the interaction in real time.
0:30:10 And that is not helpful.
0:30:11 You know, if you think of something like playing piano
0:30:14 or dancing, right, when you’re in that flow state,
0:30:16 you’re not thinking about like,
0:30:17 oh, are my toes in the right place?
0:30:18 Where are my fingers going next?
0:30:21 You’re just doing it, you’re just executing, right?
0:30:24 And this goes back to that idea of effortless socializing.
0:30:26 It might sound weird to say that socializing
0:30:28 is a kind of flow state,
0:30:29 but I think we’ve all had those moments
0:30:30 where you have a really good hangout
0:30:32 or you have a great conversation and it just goes.
0:30:34 And you’re not thinking about it,
0:30:36 you’re not self-monitoring, you’re just in it.
0:30:39 And I think the minute we start second guessing stuff,
0:30:41 it’s not even that we don’t know the script,
0:30:42 but it’s like in that moment,
0:30:47 we create that doubt that leads us to be unable
0:30:49 to just land on one and execute it.
0:30:54 Why is silence so awkward?
0:30:57 – Silence becomes awkward
0:30:59 when we don’t know how to interpret it.
0:31:04 And I think that some silences can be quite clear.
0:31:06 Sometimes we know what a silence is doing
0:31:09 and there’s companionable silences, right?
0:31:10 Where we’re not worried about
0:31:11 what the other person is thinking.
0:31:13 That’s a moment, right?
0:31:15 That’s a milestone in a relationship,
0:31:16 the companionable silence.
0:31:19 But silence can be open to ambiguity
0:31:21 and that can create awkwardness.
0:31:24 – Small talk.
0:31:25 – Oof.
0:31:29 – Whether it’s like at a party or you’re just,
0:31:32 I don’t know, pushing the grocery cart
0:31:35 through your produce aisle and you bump into
0:31:36 someone you haven’t seen in a while.
0:31:38 Someone, maybe it’s an old friend,
0:31:40 maybe it’s someone who’s a friend of a friend.
0:31:42 You don’t really know what to say.
0:31:45 Under no other circumstances would you even
0:31:47 talk to them, really.
0:31:49 You’re probably not in each other’s life for a reason.
0:31:51 Why are those sorts of interactions
0:31:53 so painfully awkward?
0:31:55 – Yeah, I think it depends.
0:31:57 I don’t think they have to be.
0:32:00 I think, you know, my husband is British
0:32:02 and I think there’s like kind of a running joke
0:32:04 that British people talk about the weather a lot.
0:32:07 But notice, the weather is a great go-to small talk topic.
0:32:10 And I think what that shows is that often
0:32:13 the role of small talk is not to actually exchange
0:32:15 like a lot of meaningful information.
0:32:18 It’s just to kind of do a quick social check-in,
0:32:20 give a little FaceTime to the other person
0:32:22 and then you move on.
0:32:24 – Well, this is probably half the value
0:32:25 of following sports.
0:32:26 That’s another one.
0:32:28 If you don’t, if you have no idea what else to say,
0:32:30 just fuck man, you see the Dodgers game?
0:32:32 I mean, it’s like, it’s always there.
0:32:33 You can pull that cart out.
0:32:36 – And it cuts across so many other differences, right?
0:32:39 And it’s, I mean, even if someone roots for a rival team,
0:32:41 right, you can give them a little bit of a hard time
0:32:43 and tease them a little bit and it’s fine.
0:32:45 Think about small talk.
0:32:49 It may not even be exactly that it’s awkward,
0:32:53 at least in my experience, though it can be.
0:32:59 But if it’s not awkward, it’s most definitely boring,
0:33:00 which is one of the reasons I always,
0:33:03 even when I live in DC, I just,
0:33:06 I’m not into the whole cocktail circuit thing.
0:33:08 I just don’t like it.
0:33:12 Do you think that’s because when you’re doing small talk
0:33:16 in those settings, you’re not deviating
0:33:17 from the script actually.
0:33:20 Like it’s almost meant to alleviate awkwardness.
0:33:24 And therefore we stick very closely to a script.
0:33:28 – I think another reason small talk can become awkward
0:33:30 is that without realizing it,
0:33:33 we are depending on all kinds of social cues
0:33:35 from our partner, whether it’s eye contact,
0:33:38 timing of conversational pauses,
0:33:41 even the distance someone stands from us,
0:33:43 where they’re looking, are they looking at us?
0:33:44 Are they looking over our shoulder?
0:33:46 We’ve all had that experience.
0:33:49 So small talk can go off the rails,
0:33:52 even while the topic is, stays perfectly normal
0:33:54 and consistent and boring,
0:33:55 we can find the interaction awkward,
0:33:57 maybe even for reasons that we’re not aware of
0:34:00 or couldn’t articulate or couldn’t pinpoint.
0:34:02 But yes, I also agree that small talk,
0:34:05 if it goes perfectly well, can be boring, right?
0:34:06 And that brings up another interesting point,
0:34:08 which is like, well, what are the alternatives
0:34:09 to awkwardness sometimes, right?
0:34:12 Is it better to try to introduce a new topic?
0:34:15 Is it better to try to do something a little different?
0:34:18 Or is it better to play it safe, avoid awkwardness
0:34:20 and just be bored?
0:34:25 – One thing your book really emphasizes,
0:34:28 which I like, even if it’s not the main point,
0:34:34 is how much of social life really is a performance,
0:34:36 which isn’t to say that everything we do
0:34:38 with other people is phony,
0:34:41 but it is a kind of dance, isn’t it?
0:34:42 And because we can’t control everything
0:34:44 and because we don’t know what’s going on
0:34:47 in other people’s minds,
0:34:50 it’s fraught with all kinds of hazards.
0:34:52 – Yes, absolutely, I think that’s right.
0:34:57 And I think that, again, that there’s this tendency
0:34:59 or I think temptation to blame ourselves
0:35:01 when interactions go off the rails,
0:35:05 but the expression it takes to the tango is apt here, right?
0:35:08 We’re dependent on a partner also to give us cues.
0:35:10 And I think we have to also be mindful
0:35:11 of the cues we’re giving out to others.
0:35:13 So the idea of a performance,
0:35:15 I really like the point you made there,
0:35:18 that it’s not to say it’s insincere or phony,
0:35:22 but it is that we are executing a kind of performance.
0:35:26 And some of that is up to us
0:35:28 and some of it is based on the roles
0:35:31 that other people make available to us
0:35:35 and that our day-to-day life makes available to us.
0:35:37 – There’s the social cues part of it.
0:35:41 And then there’s experiences when you deviate
0:35:44 one way or the other from what’s expected.
0:35:47 You know, I may have talked about this on the show before,
0:35:51 but back in 2018, I went on this reporting trip
0:35:55 to Costa Rica and I did a lot of psychedelics
0:35:56 over the course of a week.
0:35:57 I even wrote about it for Vox
0:35:59 and you can find it on the interwebs
0:36:01 if you’re so inclined.
0:36:04 But I bring it up because reading your book,
0:36:06 it made me think a lot about that.
0:36:11 And that led for me to a very interesting social experiment.
0:36:16 I would say probably for at least six months or so
0:36:17 after that experience,
0:36:22 I was easily the most present I’ve ever been in my life
0:36:24 because it just wasn’t in my head really at all
0:36:26 like I normally am.
0:36:28 So I was very attuned to the moment
0:36:30 and the people around me.
0:36:35 And during this time, without thinking about it at all,
0:36:40 I was really, and I mean, really making eye contact
0:36:43 with people like if I was talking to you
0:36:45 or if you were talking to me, I was listening.
0:36:47 I mean, really listening.
0:36:49 And I was looking you right in the eyes the whole time.
0:36:52 And after a while, I started to realize
0:36:54 how much awkwardness this created
0:36:58 because people aren’t accustomed to that.
0:37:01 We’re not really present with each other in that way.
0:37:03 We’re distracted.
0:37:06 We often perform listening,
0:37:10 but we’re mostly in our little bubbles
0:37:12 colliding as minimally as possible
0:37:15 as we move through our mostly private lives.
0:37:17 And what I was doing,
0:37:22 unselfconsciously was rupturing that social pattern
0:37:23 a little bit, breaking from the script.
0:37:25 And it was awkward.
0:37:28 And after a while, I guess I just fell back
0:37:31 into the default routine and got back on the script.
0:37:33 And it’s less awkward, for sure.
0:37:36 But it was an instructive experiment for me.
0:37:41 And reflecting back on it now, that’s a lot clearer.
0:37:44 – I mean, I kind of love this.
0:37:46 This is kind of hilarious.
0:37:50 And to me, it’s this idea that you’re walking around
0:37:52 being really present and listening
0:37:54 and doing all these things that you are great
0:37:55 and that we want to do.
0:37:57 And yet simultaneously just making other people
0:38:01 super uncomfortable with the level of eye contact, right?
0:38:03 That they’re feeling like this is really awkward.
0:38:05 It was a little much, yeah.
0:38:08 – I think this point about eye contact is interesting
0:38:12 because we are so sensitive to differences in eye contact.
0:38:14 And it’s also something that’s culturally variable.
0:38:16 What amount of gaze time is appropriate?
0:38:18 What it means?
0:38:21 What it might mean coming from a man?
0:38:23 What it might mean coming from a woman
0:38:24 in different situations?
0:38:26 And I think we also can adjust pretty well
0:38:29 without making a conscious effort too, right?
0:38:31 I think some of us might have to like consciously
0:38:33 remind ourselves, look in the eyes, right?
0:38:35 Look at that person, make eye contact.
0:38:38 Sometimes people talk about telling their kids that too.
0:38:39 When you meet someone, shake their hand
0:38:41 and look at them in the eye, right?
0:38:43 So we can consciously adjust it.
0:38:46 But it is again, something that I think we negotiate
0:38:50 with others tacitly without intending to.
0:38:52 – What do you think is the biggest price we pay
0:38:56 for our fear of awkwardness?
0:38:58 What doesn’t happen in the world
0:39:00 that we should want to happen
0:39:05 because we’re so desperate to avoid awkward situations?
0:39:08 – So I think there’s a lot of opportunities
0:39:12 for human connection and comfort that are lost.
0:39:14 One case I think about a lot is grief
0:39:19 and that we are, let me preface this by saying,
0:39:22 I’m always mindful that when I draw these generalizations,
0:39:25 everybody’s experience of awkwardness is different.
0:39:27 And I think as a philosopher,
0:39:29 I’m trained to make pronouncements
0:39:32 like big generalizations, universal principles.
0:39:35 I think one thing that’s challenging about awkwardness
0:39:36 is everyone’s experience is different.
0:39:41 There are so many ways for things to be and go awkward.
0:39:45 But I do think that we tend to be awkward around grief
0:39:47 and talking about grief and loss.
0:39:49 And I think that comes to mind particularly
0:39:52 because that’s a time when people are really hurting
0:39:55 and can really use connection and comfort.
0:39:59 And I think that a lot of times people are hesitant
0:40:02 to reach out because they don’t know what to say.
0:40:05 I think that there was a time when
0:40:07 if everybody belonged to the same religious group,
0:40:09 we would have highly scripted rituals
0:40:10 around grief and mourning.
0:40:13 And I think that as we’ve gotten more choice
0:40:16 in our religious or spiritual practices,
0:40:19 which is a good thing, one of the side effects of that
0:40:23 has been a kind of loss of sense of how we should respond to
0:40:25 or talk about death and loss and grief.
0:40:28 So that’s one case that comes to mind.
0:40:30 Maybe a less emotionally fraught one,
0:40:33 although still pretty big, is money.
0:40:35 There’s been a lot written about the salary gap
0:40:38 and inequities in pay.
0:40:41 And I think that’s partly a consequence of the fact
0:40:44 that we don’t really necessarily know how to talk about money
0:40:46 or there’s all kinds of weird social norms
0:40:48 about discussing money.
0:40:50 And that can contribute to misapprehensions
0:40:55 and ignorance and allow inequalities to persist.
0:40:56 So those are two cases.
0:41:00 I think there’s probably other topics that come to mind.
0:41:03 People have recently started talking about menopause
0:41:06 and the way that the experience of menopause affects people
0:41:12 and that that’s something that we’ve had a lot of social silence
0:41:16 around to the point where when people start to experience it,
0:41:19 they may kind of be perplexed by their own experience
0:41:21 and not be sure how to talk about it with others.
0:41:24 I do think in a lot of these cases,
0:41:28 the ability to talk about things online has really helped
0:41:30 and has allowed people to figure out
0:41:33 how they want to talk about things in advance of in-person,
0:41:36 face-to-face social interactions.
0:41:38 And I think that that is one way in which the internet
0:41:42 can make life less awkward is by allowing us to try this out
0:41:45 and figure out what we think in advance of going
0:41:48 into those in-person, potentially awkward interactions.
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0:46:36 (orchestral music)
0:46:51 – For me, it’s almost the tragic little paradox
0:46:54 of awkwardness that, you know, it’s only possible
0:46:59 because we’re social creatures and we want to belong.
0:47:00 We want to be accepted.
0:47:03 So we’re constantly trying to conform.
0:47:06 But it’s precisely because of this fear
0:47:11 of not being accepted that we’re often not present.
0:47:15 We’re not authentically open to real connection
0:47:18 because we’re too busy trying to perform our roles
0:47:22 or perform the social script, whatever we think it is.
0:47:28 But I don’t know, do you think I’m overthinking this?
0:47:30 – No, I think that’s exactly right.
0:47:34 I think that awkwardness, yeah, it’s a sign
0:47:38 of how much we care about coordinating with other people
0:47:41 as a way of making ourselves, it’s the vulnerability
0:47:43 that, you know, accompanies our movement
0:47:44 for the social world.
0:47:47 And I think that is a little bit sad,
0:47:49 but I think also if we can just own up to it
0:47:52 and recognize that it’s something that we share with others
0:47:55 and maybe be willing to make ourselves vulnerable,
0:47:59 maybe then we can start to evade some of that paradox
0:48:00 that you allude to.
0:48:03 I do think also that one thing we can do is be mindful
0:48:08 of, you know, if we think of awkwardness as bound up
0:48:11 with all of these dynamics of power and privilege
0:48:12 and who gets to be awkward
0:48:15 and who gets to get away with being awkward,
0:48:18 I think we can also try to bear some of that awkwardness
0:48:21 for others who might be less able to put themselves
0:48:23 out there and be vulnerable like that.
0:48:26 Anytime you’re talking about social dynamics,
0:48:28 there’s always this background element of power,
0:48:32 who has it, who doesn’t, and how that colors in interaction.
0:48:37 When there is a clear power imbalance between people,
0:48:41 who’s responsible for alleviating the awkwardness?
0:48:43 Who should be responsible?
0:48:46 Or is anyone really responsible for that?
0:48:49 – I mean, I really like that you went from who should,
0:48:52 who is responsible to who should be responsible
0:48:54 because I think that’s a distinction we don’t often make.
0:48:56 And I think without realizing it,
0:48:58 sometimes we have certain expectations.
0:49:01 I think women often feel responsible
0:49:04 for other people’s emotional comfort.
0:49:06 And I think there’s an expectation
0:49:08 that women will kind of manage emotions
0:49:10 in a way that doesn’t attach to men.
0:49:13 So I think that can make it doubly hard.
0:49:15 And if you think about some of the issues
0:49:18 that tend to become awkward when we’re discussing them.
0:49:19 So throughout the podcast,
0:49:21 I’ve alluded to like sexual harassment,
0:49:26 talking about menopause or reproduction, salary gaps,
0:49:27 things like this,
0:49:29 these do tend to be things that affect women.
0:49:31 And I don’t think it’s a coincidence
0:49:35 that women tend to be assigned responsibility
0:49:37 for alleviating awkwardness.
0:49:38 And therefore I might be more afraid
0:49:40 of making things awkward,
0:49:44 of not seeming to raise uncomfortable topics.
0:49:49 So I think that one thing we can do sort of collectively
0:49:51 is to be aware going into situations
0:49:54 of where we might have more privilege and more power
0:49:57 and then take it on ourselves to alleviate the awkwardness.
0:49:59 If we’re worried that a certain social norm
0:50:00 or script is unclear,
0:50:03 we could just make it explicit, right?
0:50:04 I am a college professor
0:50:07 and people sometimes talk about this kind of hidden curriculum
0:50:09 that a lot of our students come in
0:50:11 knowing what office hours are,
0:50:13 knowing how to email a professor,
0:50:14 knowing exactly what’s expected
0:50:17 in terms of behavior in class and note taking
0:50:18 and things like this,
0:50:19 but some students don’t.
0:50:22 And they might feel really awkward in certain situations.
0:50:25 And if we just take that minute and make things explicit
0:50:27 and say, when you’re emailing a professor,
0:50:29 here’s a good way to go about it
0:50:32 or here’s what office hours are
0:50:33 and here’s what you should expect
0:50:35 when you come to office hours,
0:50:37 we can just make things less awkward for those people.
0:50:39 It might feel weird to us to do that
0:50:43 because it’s not something we’ve ever explicitly articulated,
0:50:44 but it might, you know,
0:50:47 in taking on that little bit of weirdness for ourselves,
0:50:49 we might make things significantly less awkward
0:50:51 for someone else.
0:50:56 – I like that you point out what a weird,
0:51:00 and now this is my language, obnoxious flex.
0:51:03 It is when you have powerful people.
0:51:08 You know, it is a very particular kind of flex
0:51:11 by very powerful people to not care about creating awkwardness
0:51:14 because they’re always the most powerful person in the room.
0:51:16 So they don’t have to give a shit
0:51:19 about conforming to social norms.
0:51:23 So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg can walk into the room
0:51:27 and do his, whatever his thing is now.
0:51:30 He seems to have undergone quite a bit of brand management
0:51:31 here in the last couple of years,
0:51:33 but you know what I’m talking about, right?
0:51:35 I mean, that that is a very particular kind of flex
0:51:39 by a person who knows they’re sort of above it all
0:51:40 in that way and not accountable.
0:51:41 So they can create awkwardness
0:51:44 without really worrying about it
0:51:47 because they have more power than everyone else
0:51:49 they’re interacting with.
0:51:51 – Absolutely, I think that’s absolutely right.
0:51:52 And I think there’s really two issues there.
0:51:55 One is this ability to kind of use awkwardness
0:51:58 as a social flex that’s available to some people
0:51:58 and not others.
0:52:00 So if you contrast someone like Mark Zuckerberg
0:52:03 to someone like female CEO,
0:52:06 and the one who comes to mind is Elizabeth Holmes,
0:52:07 obviously had some other issues
0:52:10 in addition to her presentation.
0:52:12 But you know, she was widely pilloried
0:52:16 for her kind of self-presentation and her awkwardness
0:52:19 in a way that you just don’t see male CEOs
0:52:21 getting called out the same way
0:52:24 or losing credibility in terms of presentation
0:52:25 for being awkward.
0:52:27 But there’s a second point you mentioned
0:52:28 which is accountability.
0:52:30 And I think that we do see awkwardness being used
0:52:31 to evade accountability.
0:52:35 And I think this happens both in business and in academia
0:52:37 where there’s this sense of like,
0:52:38 well, that person’s just so awkward,
0:52:42 you can’t expect them to adhere to these kinds of norms
0:52:44 or, oh, they didn’t mean anything by it.
0:52:46 They’re just really awkward.
0:52:46 We have to, you know,
0:52:49 we can’t hold them to the same standards as others
0:52:52 where, you know, other people’s social discomfort
0:52:54 seems suddenly not to matter as much.
0:52:56 And we let people get away with behavior
0:52:59 that is really sometimes deeply problematic
0:53:01 in the name of awkwardness.
0:53:05 – If you’re right, and I think you are,
0:53:09 that awkwardness is a social property.
0:53:11 So individuals aren’t responsible
0:53:14 for creating it for the most part.
0:53:18 And it will always be a part of life with other people.
0:53:20 But if you are someone listening to this
0:53:22 and you’d like to decrease the amount of awkwardness
0:53:24 in your life as much as possible
0:53:27 or at least change your relationship to awkwardness
0:53:31 so that it’s less taxing, what’s your advice?
0:53:32 – So first, can I just say,
0:53:35 I do think people can create awkwardness.
0:53:37 And I think sometimes that can be very strategic
0:53:38 for good or evil, right?
0:53:40 Sometimes we can use awkwardness to draw attention
0:53:42 to an interaction that we find problematic.
0:53:44 So an example I use in the book is like,
0:53:47 if you’re, you know, some graduate students
0:53:48 are going to dinner with a professor
0:53:52 who makes a really sexist gross joke, you know,
0:53:54 one strategy might be to just call him out.
0:53:55 But if no one feels comfortable doing that,
0:53:58 you can just let an awkward silence sit there
0:54:00 and just not laugh, not respond, not say anything.
0:54:03 And that awkwardness kind of really draws attention,
0:54:06 I think, to the joke not landing.
0:54:08 And so it can be a way of saying something
0:54:10 where you don’t actually have the power to say it.
0:54:12 So I do think we can create awkward situations
0:54:15 sometimes strategically for good.
0:54:16 But to go to your question,
0:54:19 so if you want to decrease the awkward situations
0:54:22 in your life, I think there are a few things we can do
0:54:24 when we feel an awkward situation looming.
0:54:27 One is to think about the interaction itself
0:54:29 and what our goals are for that interaction.
0:54:32 Like what kind of interaction do we want this to be?
0:54:36 So say we’re worried about politics coming up
0:54:38 during the holiday dinner and it’s going to get awkward.
0:54:40 One thing we might think about as well,
0:54:42 if we have to have a conversation about politics,
0:54:44 what’s the most important thing to us?
0:54:46 Like what is our goal for that interaction?
0:54:48 Do we want to feel heard?
0:54:50 Do we want to convince the other person?
0:54:53 Do we want to make them feel comfortable?
0:54:54 Do we want to make a third party
0:54:55 who’s listening feel comfortable?
0:54:57 And that can help us figure out
0:55:00 what script should guide us through the interaction.
0:55:04 I think another thing we can do is admit uncertainty
0:55:06 and ask for help where we can.
0:55:07 So if we’re going into a situation
0:55:09 we really don’t know, right?
0:55:11 Like what kind of party is this going to be?
0:55:12 How many people are going to be there?
0:55:14 What should I wear?
0:55:15 It’s okay to ask these things.
0:55:17 And I think that if you’re someone who is, say,
0:55:20 hosting a party and you think it’s going to be really
0:55:22 ambiguous, you can tell people, right?
0:55:24 Hey, I’m having some people over,
0:55:26 they’ll probably be about 30 people there, right?
0:55:28 Let people know in advance what to expect.
0:55:30 And as I said before, I think this is something
0:55:34 that people in positions to do so can do
0:55:36 to make things easier for others
0:55:38 who might not feel as comfortable asking questions.
0:55:39 And it’s certainly that something
0:55:41 that we can be attentive to in the workplace.
0:55:44 So if you’re conducting job interviews,
0:55:47 you might let candidates know what to expect.
0:55:49 Here’s how the interview will be structured.
0:55:52 Here’s what we’d expect from you, so on and so forth.
0:55:54 And then the last thing I would just say is
0:55:59 it’s easy to focus on how unpleasant awkwardness is.
0:56:02 But I think one thing we can bear in mind is like,
0:56:05 what are the alternatives to awkwardness?
0:56:07 Because I think that sometimes we’re so afraid
0:56:09 of awkwardness that we lose sight of the fact
0:56:11 that the alternatives might be worse.
0:56:14 So going back to a conversation about politics,
0:56:16 maybe it’s awkward to talk about politics
0:56:18 with your extended family.
0:56:21 But what would you prefer, an awkward conversation
0:56:23 or a really angry conversation?
0:56:25 Because if awkwardness is a kind of uncertainty
0:56:27 and hesitation, the alternative to that
0:56:31 might be a kind of very certain, very angry tone
0:56:33 or interaction, right?
0:56:34 And so I think sometimes awkwardness
0:56:36 has this other function and this other utility,
0:56:40 which is it can keep us from landing on social scripts
0:56:43 that are really counterproductive or really negative, right?
0:56:45 It can kind of keep us reserved
0:56:50 or keep us from entering into like angry or offensive
0:56:55 or really other problematic emotional scripts.
0:56:58 One thing I learned in that experience
0:57:00 I was talking about earlier is that
0:57:04 there are real risks involved anytime you deviate
0:57:07 from the established social script
0:57:09 in ways that might create a little bit of uncertainty.
0:57:11 Even if your intentions are good,
0:57:14 it might not go the way you hope.
0:57:18 And maybe the point of all this is that that’s okay.
0:57:19 That’s life.
0:57:21 This isn’t actually a scripted TV show.
0:57:22 It’s unpredictable.
0:57:23 Shit happens.
0:57:26 But I guess easier said than done.
0:57:28 – Well, and scripts have to change sometimes too.
0:57:30 And I think that’s one place
0:57:31 where we see awkwardness emerging, right?
0:57:34 Sometimes the old scripts just don’t work anymore, right?
0:57:35 – And that’s good.
0:57:36 – Yeah, it’s good.
0:57:38 And we can be explicit, right?
0:57:41 We can say like, okay, look,
0:57:44 now I’m in this polyamorous relationship
0:57:46 and I wanna bring all my partners home for Thanksgiving
0:57:48 and like, what’s the deal?
0:57:51 What’s the norm around introducing multiple partners
0:57:52 to your family?
0:57:53 And we can just figure it out, right?
0:57:54 And that’s okay.
0:57:57 The world will not end if we kind of explicitly acknowledge
0:57:59 that some of these norms are things
0:58:01 we have control over, we can negotiate,
0:58:05 and we can figure out what’s gonna work for us collectively.
0:58:07 – Could we get rid of all this awkwardness
0:58:11 if everyone was forced to take improv classes in school?
0:58:12 And I’m kind of serious.
0:58:14 I mean, if awkwardness is just the result
0:58:16 of the lack of a social script,
0:58:20 then maybe being comfortable without a script is the answer.
0:58:23 – Maybe, I guess a different question is,
0:58:24 would we want to?
0:58:26 Would we want to get rid of awkwardness?
0:58:29 Or is it better to have situations
0:58:30 where we feel a little hesitant,
0:58:32 where we feel a little uncertain,
0:58:34 and where we take a minute to become aware
0:58:36 of the social infrastructure around us?
0:58:39 Because once we recognize that it’s there,
0:58:42 we can be conscious of our role in creating it
0:58:43 and that gives us the ability
0:58:46 to consciously reflect on and change it.
0:58:47 – Yeah, I don’t think it’s about getting rid
0:58:48 of that uncertainty.
0:58:50 It’s about changing our relationship to it.
0:58:52 It’s about being comfortable with it,
0:58:54 and not trying to expunge it.
0:58:55 – Yeah, and I don’t even think
0:58:57 we need improv classes for that.
0:58:59 I think people just need to read my book.
0:59:02 – First off, that’s a false choice.
0:59:04 We can clearly do both.
0:59:08 But I mean, I’ve always, I mean, the older I get,
0:59:10 the more I believe that doing improv comedy
0:59:13 is almost like the ultimate training for navigating life.
0:59:16 And it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,
0:59:17 but I keep not doing it.
0:59:19 – I mean, I think having a podcast
0:59:21 must be a kind of improv, right?
0:59:23 I mean, you have to get good at some kind of improv
0:59:28 and reacting to your yes, reacting to the conversation.
0:59:31 But I don’t know if we need to do,
0:59:33 there’s two things improv might do for you.
0:59:38 One is to help you sort of react on your feet in the moment.
0:59:43 And the other way to get out of awkwardness
0:59:44 or to mind awkwardness less
0:59:47 is to just be okay with discomfort, right?
0:59:49 And I do think that second thing,
0:59:52 I often think that being okay with other people’s discomfort
0:59:55 and your own discomfort is a kind of superpower, right?
0:59:56 And I think in some ways,
0:59:58 that’s what going to a cocktail party
1:00:01 can feel like sometimes it’s just standing there
1:00:04 feeling like you are on stage failing
1:00:06 and you have no choice but to push through.
1:00:08 And I think once we recognize that like,
1:00:10 it’s not just us, it happens to everyone
1:00:13 and it’s not necessarily our fault.
1:00:16 And it doesn’t say anything terrible about us, right?
1:00:19 Improv is about building connections with your partner.
1:00:20 I assume I haven’t really done it.
1:00:23 So I’m kind of basing this on what I know of improv.
1:00:26 But I think that’s another way to get out of our own awkwardness
1:00:28 is to pay attention to other people
1:00:30 and to try to attune ourselves to other people.
1:00:33 And I think that’s one reason that, you know,
1:00:35 we might see an analogy with improv here, right?
1:00:37 That willingness to put something out there
1:00:40 and have someone else say yes and, right?
1:00:43 But notice if your improv partner never gives you the yes and,
1:00:45 there’s not much you can do there.
1:00:47 And blaming yourself is really a mistake
1:00:50 because they’re not giving you much to work with.
1:00:52 Yeah.
1:00:56 So if someone listens to this conversation or read your book,
1:00:58 what is the most important lesson
1:01:01 you’d want them to walk away with?
1:01:04 Yeah, I mean, I think what I would hope people would take away
1:01:07 is awkwardness is not a personal failing.
1:01:12 Awkwardness is not a you problem, it’s an us problem.
1:01:16 And that awkwardness is something that happens
1:01:18 not necessarily because of a mistake someone made
1:01:21 or because someone is bad at something.
1:01:26 It can be something that happens simply because we’ve outgrown
1:01:30 the social norms and scripts available to us as a society.
1:01:34 So I guess the point of that is we can see awkwardness
1:01:36 as an opportunity to take something
1:01:40 that’s not working for us and re-engineer it.
1:01:41 I like that.
1:01:44 And yeah, I think I’d stress the same thing.
1:01:46 I mean, especially if you’re someone
1:01:48 who thinks of yourself as awkward
1:01:53 or who has been called awkward by other people,
1:01:55 maybe take it easy on yourself.
1:01:57 Maybe say, you know what, screw that, I’m not awkward.
1:02:00 The world we’ve built might make me feel awkward sometimes,
1:02:03 but that says more about the world than me.
1:02:06 So yeah, let’s leave it right there.
1:02:10 Alexandra Plakius, this was a lot of fun.
1:02:11 Thank you.
1:02:12 Thank you so much.
1:02:15 Also, go check out Alexandra’s book.
1:02:18 It is called Awkwardness, A Theory.
1:02:33 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
1:02:36 As always, we wanna know what you think.
1:02:40 So go ahead and drop us a line at the grayarea@vox.com.
1:02:45 And after that, rate, review, and subscribe to the pod,
1:02:46 if you haven’t already.
1:02:49 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
1:02:51 and Travis Larchek.
1:02:54 Today’s episode was engineered by Patrick Boyd,
1:02:58 fact-checked by Anouk Dussot, edited by Jorge Just,
1:03:01 and Alex O’Brington wrote our theme music.
1:03:04 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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1:03:24 – Everything about music
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1:04:35 (dramatic music)

0:00:06 Everything about music is secretly a story about technology, how we listen to it from vinyl
0:00:13 to iPods to Spotify, how we make it from pianos to computer plugins to AI prompts,
0:00:18 how we discover it from music blogs to TikTok. All this month on The Vergecast, we’re telling
0:00:24 stories about those changes and how technological change changes not just the way we experience
0:00:31 music, but the music itself. All that, all this month on The Vergecast, wherever you find podcasts.
0:00:39 Hello. I’m coming to you on a Friday, which is an unusual thing to do, but this has been
0:00:45 an unusual week. I am still sifting through it, and I know many of you are as well.
0:00:51 You will hear some of my thoughts soon enough, I promise. But in the meantime,
0:00:57 my colleague Jacqueline Hill at Vox’s new podcast, Explain It To Me, has swooped in to help.
0:01:03 Her team got lots of listener questions in the aftermath of Trump’s win on Tuesday,
0:01:09 and she got some answers for them from the Vox reporters who know the most about why the outcome
0:01:17 was what it was and what it might mean. Things are a little unsettled, I get that, but information
0:01:23 is about the best thing we can offer, and JQ and our team have a lot they can tell you.
0:01:29 We’re dropping that episode here, and I hope it helps. See you back in the feed on Monday.
0:01:43 You’re listening to Explain It To Me. I’m Jacqueline Hill. Wow. What a week.
0:01:49 As I’m sure many of you know, Tuesday was election day, and I know that you know because
0:01:55 of the tons of questions we received from you. I’m talking about from all over the country and
0:02:01 throughout the entire voting process. Hey, my name is Luke. I’m from Michigan. My question is about
0:02:06 the election. I waffle between anxiety and trying to reassure myself that everything’s going to be
0:02:16 okay about this election. It’s kind of really boring to have our entire world descend on just
0:02:22 a few states, and it’s really frustrating to have people who are nothing like me don’t really
0:02:27 represent my beliefs have such a major sway in the decisions of this country.
0:02:32 People called in with questions about their results, about the aftermath,
0:02:37 and what it all means for the next four years. You also shared what you were experiencing
0:02:42 throughout the day. Here’s a call we got pretty early on from Ronan, who voted for the first time.
0:02:49 It is currently November 5th, and it is election day. I’m a student at Utah State University.
0:02:54 I’m a first time voter and a college student who isn’t committed to either party. Tonight,
0:03:00 I will be hosting an election party. I went and got some, some little flags and some materials
0:03:05 for that. I’ll be making some brownies and some cookies. So I’m really excited because I think
0:03:11 no matter what happens, to me, it’s a celebration that we’re seeing democracy happen in real time.
0:03:15 And that might just be the political science student in me, but I’m really excited about it.
0:03:21 And people kept checking in with questions and reflections throughout the night.
0:03:32 Time is 9 24 p.m. I just got home from working election day. This was my first election cycle
0:03:41 and election day working as a poll worker. And overall, it was fantastic. The people I met there,
0:03:47 they were the most professional, the kindest, the most polite people I’ve ever met.
0:03:58 There was one unpleasant experience during early voting. This lady commented, “Oh, you have really
0:04:05 beautiful dark hair. Where are you from? Are you from Knoxville?” And I said, “No, I’m from Venezuela.”
0:04:15 And as soon as I said that, her face got incredibly serious as if that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
0:04:21 And I just let her know, you know, when you’re done voting, there’s a scanner at the end of
0:04:26 the room. You can turn in your ballot there, right? I hope she had an okay rest of the day.
0:04:31 All right. Thank you for taking your time to listen to this. Bye.
0:04:39 Now, what was I up to? I spent election night at the office with my fellow Vox journalists.
0:04:43 I got there around six-ish. Most of my colleagues were already there,
0:04:47 gathered around the tacos we were having for dinner, plenty of soda,
0:04:52 a desperate and successful hunt for cold brew, and emergency energy drinks on deck.
0:04:58 There were also special appearances from a co-worker’s baby and another co-worker’s dog,
0:05:04 two very cute additions to the evening. And I should say, the thing about election night in DC
0:05:10 is that people really let their nerd flags fly. On my way in, I saw people headed to bars for
0:05:16 results, watch parties, and I even ran into a DJ dressed as Steve Kornacki. For a lot of us,
0:05:22 it was a long night. I’m sure it was a long night for many of you too. In fact, I know it was because
0:05:28 the questions kept rolling in. I had so many questions about elections. First of all,
0:05:35 every time election comes, my question about the election results revolves around how various
0:05:40 demographics voted in this election and last night in the years. As the night wore on, the questions
0:05:48 started to change. I just wanted to call and ask, how are those Democrats feeling right now?
0:05:58 I bet they’re crying, huh? I bet they’re crying, huh? Trump 2024. With all of the stress and
0:06:04 disappointments that came with the election results this year, something that’s been going
0:06:09 through my mind is, when will America be ready for a woman to lead the country?
0:06:16 My name is Blake from Florida. My question about the election, seeing that Donald Trump has won,
0:06:19 so what’s going to happen with all of those indictments?
0:06:25 I am also curious about women’s reproductive rights. This was a huge issue for me when I
0:06:32 went into the polls this year. And so I’m curious how much this is really going to impact things
0:06:37 from where they are today. And when all was said and almost done, the questions we got
0:06:44 kind of fell into a few themes. What just happened? Why did it happen? And what’s going to happen next?
0:06:50 And so today, we check in with our colleagues who cover Republicans, Democrats, and the courts,
0:06:54 and we bring them your questions. That’s today on Explain It To Me.
0:07:07 Hi, Christian. It is the day after the election. It’s actually 3.42 p.m. on Wednesday. And I haven’t
0:07:15 seen you in, I don’t know, a few hours. I’m sure it was all a blur. How are you doing today? It
0:07:20 feels like we have come a long way from Tuesday night’s tacos. Yeah, we have come a long way.
0:07:29 I might sound similarly delirious. It’s pretty astounding what happened.
0:07:34 Yeah. So the first set of questions from our listeners can kind of all be boiled down to
0:07:40 what exactly happened this week in the clear light of the morning, or I guess the mid-late
0:07:48 afternoon. What are your takeaways? Yeah, the big takeaway obviously is just that this is a country
0:07:55 that was ready to issue a very stunning rebuke to Democrats, and specifically to Vice President
0:08:02 Harris and President Joe Biden. So top line, we saw red shifts in counties across the country.
0:08:11 Almost, I’m pretty sure no state was more liberal than in 2020. It’s almost impossible to talk about
0:08:19 what’s happening among subsects of the electorate without acknowledging that just across every
0:08:26 kind of category of voter, there was a shift to the right. And I can say very clearly now,
0:08:33 like one of the more interesting things that we saw last night, pretty early on, was places that
0:08:40 were Republican were getting more Republican. Places that were Democratic like urban centers
0:08:45 were not as Democratic as they might be expected to be. And the suburbs,
0:08:52 which have been making a slow shift toward Democrats since 2016, did not continue that
0:08:58 leftward drift to the degree that Democrats need in order to win some of these important races.
0:09:02 What surprised you the most about last night’s results?
0:09:08 I wasn’t expecting so many primarily Hispanic counties to flip so early or to flip to the
0:09:14 degree that they did. There’s been a lot of talk this election about the shifting electorate,
0:09:19 you know, how Trump was picking up support among Black men and Latino voters. And we
0:09:24 got some questions about that. Hi, everybody. This is Barton from Ann Arbor, Michigan. And my
0:09:32 question is, they’re saying that among Black men and among women and among Latino voters,
0:09:42 there’s a big surge in support for Trump. And my only question is, why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
0:09:50 Hi, John Cohen. This is Nicole. Last night, the media was heavily covering how Black men
0:09:57 were voting in battleground states. And I’m just curious if you could explain whether it did or
0:10:03 could have affected the election results. This question was in the air, I think. Here’s something
0:10:09 from the news. Well, votes are still pouring in, still being counted, but still a little too early
0:10:15 to tell exactly which minority will be the scapegoat in this election. But the night is young.
0:10:19 Plenty of groups are still out there. You have young voters, old voters, Asian voters all
0:10:24 still in play. Muslims, Cubans, certainly the list goes on. And some minority will be to blame
0:10:31 tonight. Okay. That last one was from The Onion, I will admit. So the fake newscaster said that
0:10:37 we’re definitely going to have a minority group to use as a scapegoat. Tell me again why the
0:10:43 scapegroup shouldn’t be the majority, why it tends to go towards those smaller groups.
0:10:48 Yeah. So I think there are two reasons. One, there are some assumptions already baked in about the
0:10:53 way that the majority is going to work, white voters. And so there’s a little bit less of a
0:10:59 shock perhaps at the same time, because some of these shifts among non-white voters, among the
0:11:06 minority, feel so novel. They feel so different. They feel so new, even though this is now what the
0:11:10 second time that we’ve seen Trump overperform with these groups of voters.
0:11:15 Is it too soon to find explanations for what’s happening? Like what do we know so far?
0:11:21 So we do know a few things. First thing is that turnout did not seem to be like an issue.
0:11:28 Turnout was pretty high this election. Turnout in battleground states was pretty high,
0:11:33 which in the past has usually meant pretty good things for Democrats, right? One of the easy
0:11:39 explanations in past cycles for why Democrats underperform is, oh, well, the base just didn’t
0:11:43 come out. Black voters didn’t turn out in urban centers. That doesn’t seem like it’s
0:11:47 going to be a pretty good explanation, because what we’re seeing is that those urban centers
0:11:52 shifted to the right. Conclusion is that lots of these places either did not continue their shift
0:11:57 to the left, like in the suburbs, or did by small amount. But we can also look at counties that have
0:12:04 large populations of voters of color, of non-white voters, and using that we can make comparisons
0:12:10 to 2020. Looking at South Texas, where we saw a shift in Hispanic and Latino, primarily Mexican
0:12:16 American and Tejanos, toward Trump in 2020, we can make a pretty easy determination that something
0:12:22 happened in Texas, because those counties that were drifting toward Trump either flipped,
0:12:28 or if they had voted for Trump in the last election, voted for Trump by a larger margin this time around.
0:12:36 Why are people asking about these specific groups? I think of pollsters, I think even in the
0:12:42 aftermath, there’s all this talk on voters of color, these people who don’t make up the majority.
0:12:47 But a lot of this is, it’s about blame. It’s about like, okay, who do we blame?
0:12:54 And it feels like the first place people point their fingers are to people of color,
0:13:03 even though a little over 75% of people in the United States are white. And I should point out,
0:13:07 we did not get any questions about what’s up with the white people who vote for Trump.
0:13:15 Why aren’t we necessarily seeing people parse out that part of the electorate as much as these
0:13:20 smaller groups of people? I think there will be some analysis that remains to be done as we get
0:13:24 better and better data, and more votes are counted, because white voters, as you said,
0:13:28 and in many of these American states as well as nationally, any kind of small shift just because
0:13:35 of how large that group is, is like, orders of magnitude more to affect the overall result
0:13:41 in a state than any kind of big shift happening among non-white voters. That’s true in Pennsylvania,
0:13:45 for example, where counties and areas that have large Puerto Rican populations that might have
0:13:52 shifted toward Republicans. But overall, there was just more underperformance among white voters
0:13:57 there that even if you were to subtract those gains from non-white voters, the state still
0:14:01 would have gone in the Republican direction because of Trump overperforming with white voters
0:14:08 in Pennsylvania. There’s still this assumption for so long, I’ve written about this a bunch,
0:14:15 we’ve talked about this, this assumption that a diversifying America would inevitably lead to
0:14:22 just progressive or liberal or Democratic dominance, regardless of other factors,
0:14:27 which once again, keeps being proven wrong and wrong. In fact, we’re probably seeing,
0:14:31 because of just how Republican the swing of the country was in general,
0:14:38 that this election will be one where racial polarization decreases, where especially among
0:14:44 Latino voters, they voted similarly or in the similar swing as white voters. But I think what
0:14:50 we’ll see is that this overall swing happened. I mean, Democrats got the turnout they wanted,
0:14:54 but it turns out that the voters that were turning out just didn’t want to vote for Democrat.
0:14:59 Okay, there is something that I’ve been paying attention to in politics,
0:15:05 and that’s the way people of color have often been grouped into one category.
0:15:12 And we aren’t all the same, like a black person and a Hispanic person and an Asian person,
0:15:16 we are not the same, we have different experiences, we are able to assimilate to different degrees,
0:15:23 if at all. Are we going to start seeing an end of POC as a political coalition?
0:15:26 Because I admit, I tire when people say people of color, and I’m like, “Do you mean black?”
0:15:31 Because sometimes they mean black, and sometimes they mean any other thing. Are we going to stop
0:15:37 seeing people talk about these groups of voters, like all together, and start seeing people discuss
0:15:43 us, I guess, more individually? Yeah, do you remember BIPOC? Oh my gosh, BIPOC. You cannot
0:15:48 tell me that that is not a bisexual person of color. So much fraught identity.
0:15:54 Right, this is the thing with identity is it’s complicated and it’s messy, and that’s why I get
0:16:00 the urge to use people of color, non-white voter, right? It’s a broad enough term to include as many
0:16:09 people, but is it too broad in terms of usefulness in politics? But there’s so much diversity that
0:16:16 underlies any one of the communities that makes up person of color, and so I do wonder how useful
0:16:21 it’ll continue to be, especially as there were some shifts potentially this year, maybe not
0:16:28 as dramatic as the polling suggested among black voters. But black voters’ behavior in this election
0:16:36 was very different from the behavior of Hispanic and Latino voters. One group still gave Democrats
0:16:42 a huge margin of support. The other looks more and more like a swing group. So there was something
0:16:51 in the water that people were just rearing to punish the incumbents. So there’s an aspect of
0:16:57 the incumbency problem now, maybe it’s no longer an advantage, like we thought in political science.
0:17:05 There’s the fact that if we’re to believe the exit polls, so have you copied out there, and then
0:17:13 the issues just did not break in Harris’ favor. So there’s definitely the economic kitchen table
0:17:18 issues that propelled a lot of this anger, but then even on some of the social issues,
0:17:25 some of these surveys are telling us that there was frustration about immigration,
0:17:32 there was frustration about gender and sexuality, which does lead to this idea of
0:17:42 something is a mess. There’s some kind of beyond just the kitchen table issues. There’s some kind
0:17:48 of other ideological aspect here. I’m curious, we got a question from Instagram. What’s next for
0:17:54 Democrats? Do they shift further left or further right? What’s next for them? The assumption is that
0:17:59 the lesson here will be they have to move to the right, that they have to move toward the center
0:18:03 to become more moderate. And there is a good criticism to be made that that tends to be the
0:18:08 lesson the Democrats get after every election. There’s maybe some social issues, some economic
0:18:13 issues on which a more progressive or a more populist stance were okay with the electorate,
0:18:20 but then you see other shifts like California deciding to implement stricter sentencing requirements
0:18:26 in the state. So there’s a mixed bag there of just what is it that the electorate wants? Is this
0:18:31 just a complete rebuke of progressivism and a complete rebuke of liberal politics? Is the solution
0:18:37 to move to the center? Yeah, we got another question from a Vox reader who wants to know,
0:18:43 do you think Harris underperformed or Trump overperformed? Can we even know that yet?
0:18:50 Yeah, it’s going to be hard to make a definitive statement. I will say that red shift makes me
0:18:57 think Trump overperformed. He did really well in rural regions. He did shockingly well in urban
0:19:06 places. On the Harris side, I don’t know that she underperformed. My whole take there is,
0:19:14 and this is kind of boring, there are complications to this, but every indicator pointed to
0:19:19 a landslide loss like more registered Republicans or self-identified Republicans in national
0:19:27 surveys, big discontentment with Joe Biden, Republican advantages on two of the top three
0:19:33 issues for voters, the economy and immigration, only abortion rights were a spot where Democrats
0:19:40 had an advantage, and then the just overall global trend that we’re seeing across democracies in
0:19:46 general, which is a COVID hangover, frustration at the way that the pandemic was managed by parties
0:19:53 that were in control, and then further frustration with the ensuing rise in inflation and cost of
0:19:59 goods. Parties in power were punished across the world this year, and Canada seems like it’ll be
0:20:07 next year. So you came to this call kind of bummed out, burned out. I know we are running on … We’ve
0:20:16 had so much coffee in the last 48 hours. What is the silver lining? I think what I’m perhaps most
0:20:28 optimistic about … That’s so real. What I’m most optimistic about is that Reputation Taylor’s
0:20:35 version is still going to come out. Christian Paz, thank you so much for joining us on Explain
0:20:41 It To Me, and helping us parse all of this out in the chaotic days after the election.
0:20:47 Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I hope you get to take a nap today. First, I’m going to need a
0:20:57 drink. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Maybe a cigarette. We’ll see. Yeah. Vice time. Vice time. Oh no, we’re Vox. Vox time.
0:21:07 Oh God, I missed the Harris speech. Oh God.
0:21:19 Vox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zell.
0:21:26 When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of
0:21:30 somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle
0:21:37 of the night, and honestly, that’s not what it is anymore. That’s Ian Mitchell, a banker-turned-fraud
0:21:43 fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists,
0:21:50 and they’re making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It’s mind-blowing
0:21:57 to see the kind of infrastructure that’s been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are
0:22:02 hundreds if not thousands of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business
0:22:07 people. These are organized criminal rings, and so once we understand the magnitude of this problem,
0:22:14 we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam
0:22:20 victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best
0:22:26 defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around
0:22:31 what do you do if you have text messages you don’t recognize? What do you do if you start getting
0:22:36 asked to send information that’s more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness,
0:22:40 a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim, and we have these conversations all the time.
0:22:46 So we are all at risk, and we all need to work together to protect each other.
0:22:53 Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com/zel. And when using digital payment platforms,
0:22:57 remember to only send money to people you know and trust.
0:23:03 Hi, Vox. Explain it to me. My name is Katie, and I have a question.
0:23:09 So even before results came in on election night, you all sit in lots of questions about
0:23:18 a specific topic. Why is Trump not in jail? President-elect Donald Trump and the law.
0:23:27 After being convicted of a ton of felonies, he’s just a convicted felon running around.
0:23:34 Like, why does this happen? Later in the night, another listener, my name’s Blake from Florida,
0:23:38 sent in a question about the courts that I’ve been wondering about since election night.
0:23:42 Seeing that Donald Trump has won, so what’s going to happen with all of those indictments
0:23:49 that feels like all of them were pushed to just after the election? And there’s this window now
0:23:54 between now and then when he’s actually inaugurated. Can any of those be expedited?
0:24:01 It feels like he committed crimes. We see that. He was able to somehow stall it,
0:24:07 and it seems bad. And in a just world, this would have been taking caros a lot earlier,
0:24:11 as opposed to letting it be something that could be kicked down the road. So thanks so much. Goodbye.
0:24:17 There’s an old legal principle. You don’t kick Superman in the balls.
0:24:21 For answers, I caught up with Vox’s senior correspondent and Supreme Court interpreter
0:24:25 Ian Milheiser for a speed round of court questions.
0:24:33 Is there some possibility that Donald Trump could spend some portion of the lame duck
0:24:40 period in jail? I mean, I’m a good enough lawyer that I could come up with an argument for why
0:24:52 that is permissible, but come on. I just think it would be unimaginably foolish to further antagonize
0:24:59 this man in this way before he becomes the most powerful man in the world at this specific moment
0:25:07 in history. So Trump has quite a few criminal cases, lots of charges. I want to talk a little
0:25:12 bit about something that Blake talked about in his questions, and that’s the president-elect
0:25:18 being able to somehow stall these cases. Can we take a step back and review all these criminal
0:25:25 cases against Trump? Give us a quick refresher on what those cases are and why each case hasn’t
0:25:31 resulted in any real consequences. So there are four cases, and each one is stalled for different
0:25:39 reasons. So, you know, the Georgia case. The Georgia case arises out of Trump’s election
0:25:45 of theft attempts. Like, you might remember the phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary
0:25:50 of State Brad Raffensperger. The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry.
0:25:57 Where he told Brad Raffensperger to try to find votes. All I want to do is this. I just want to find
0:26:08 11,780 votes. However many he needed in order to overturn the result in Georgia in 2020.
0:26:13 And there’s several reasons why that case was never likely to move forward before the election.
0:26:18 One was that they didn’t just indict Trump. They indicted all of his co-conspirators.
0:26:23 And so it was just a really complex case with, like, all sorts of normal legitimate reasons.
0:26:29 Why would take a long time to bring that to trial? The other problem there. The prosecutor didn’t
0:26:37 keep her damn pants on. Dang. The district attorney in that case had an affair with the
0:26:44 gentleman that she hired to be the lead prosecutor. And, like, my God, just a general
0:26:51 bit of legal ethical advice I will give is that if you are prosecuting one of the most important
0:27:00 cases in American history, maybe just quietly let the sexual tension build until the trial is over.
0:27:08 In the one about the documents where he just kept a bunch of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
0:27:13 This may be the most politically explosive raid ever undertaken by the FBI.
0:27:19 The FBI executing a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida.
0:27:23 The reason why that one’s been strung out can be summarized in two words, Eileen Cannon.
0:27:29 You know, he’s got a judge who’s basically on his side and who has gone out of her way
0:27:34 to do favors for him. The judge who threw out Donald Trump’s classified documents case
0:27:39 is now on a list of potential candidates to be attorney general if Trump wins.
0:27:45 The New York case where he has been convicted, this involves the least significant charges.
0:27:51 He was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up the fact
0:27:55 that he paid hush money to the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels.
0:28:08 And what happened there was Trump just asked that the sentencing be delayed till after the
0:28:14 election. The judge didn’t want to interfere with the election and so he said fine, the prosecutors
0:28:19 didn’t oppose that motion. So everyone just sort of agreed like, look, let’s wait till after the
0:28:25 election before we resolve this. And then that leads one other case, the DC case.
0:28:29 The former president did just land here at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC.
0:28:34 And remember, this is a four count indictment of the former president of the United States,
0:28:40 all in the context of the former president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
0:28:43 The main reason it’s delayed is because it went up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sat on
0:28:47 it for a really long time and then they held that he has really brought immunity.
0:28:53 The Supreme Court ruled former President Donald Trump does have immunity for some of his alleged
0:28:57 conduct as president in his federal election interference case.
0:29:01 Ian, you mentioned the Supreme Court immunity ruling that came down this past summer.
0:29:06 We’ve actually gotten some questions about what the Supreme Court’s role in all of these cases
0:29:12 against Trump is. Hey, John Cullen, Alexa here. I have a couple of questions. The biggest one being
0:29:18 the broad immunity decision. And I wonder what that means with Trump now in office and would
0:29:21 love to know more about how much the broad immunity decision really changes the scope
0:29:26 of presidential power. Yeah. Tell us about that Supreme Court ruling, which was really the head
0:29:33 liner out of the courts last term. What did that decision change and how could it play into a second
0:29:40 term for Trump or, you know, any presidency after this? So there’s a long standing rule that
0:29:47 certain high ranking government officials, including the president, prosecutors and judges,
0:29:54 cannot have civil lawsuits brought against them for like stuff that they do in the course of
0:30:00 their official duties. And I mean, there’s a pretty basic reason for that, which is that anyone can
0:30:06 file a civil lawsuit. There was a fear that, you know, those individuals would just be ground down
0:30:10 by a bunch of lawsuits that they’d have to defend against, they’d have to pay lawyers from, and it
0:30:16 would discourage them from performing their jobs or even wanting to have their jobs. So that principle
0:30:23 is long standing. The idea that the president is immune from criminal charges, at least after
0:30:29 they leave office, is completely novel and was made up by this Supreme Court. In the past, the
0:30:38 reason why this issue never came up, like most presidents just tried to comply with the criminal
0:30:44 law. And I mean, like the one thing that is clear about Donald Trump is that he thinks he can get
0:30:51 away with everything and thus far he has. And so I think that the Trump immunity decision makes a
0:30:58 second Trump presidency very dangerous, because he now knows for sure that there’ll be no consequences
0:31:06 for anything that he does. Okay, so I would love for you to bring out your crystal ball. You know,
0:31:12 we are going to look into the future. We’re going to pull that so Raven. The Supreme Court’s played
0:31:17 a really big role in shielding Trump from some of these charges through this immunity ruling.
0:31:23 It seems like most of the charges will likely go away anyway with his reelection. So
0:31:31 how will the decision affect his next term and, you know, even beyond these next four years?
0:31:36 I mean, I think they will give him a complete blanket immunity from criminal charges while he
0:31:41 is the sitting president of the United States. And I kind of think that’s the right answer as a
0:31:48 matter of law. I’m not at all sympathetic to Donald Trump, but like imagine if say,
0:31:55 Ron DeSantis’s Florida had decided to harass Biden with criminal charges, or if the state of
0:32:01 Mississippi had decided to bring fake charges against Lyndon Johnson after Lyndon Johnson signed
0:32:05 the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. There’s lots of reasons why you don’t want an
0:32:12 individual state to debilitate the president in that way. And so I think the constitutional
0:32:17 arguments against pursuing a criminal trial against a sitting president are very strong.
0:32:24 The question is like, could the charges then be revived after he leaves office? I can’t think
0:32:30 of any good legal reason why they couldn’t be revived. But by the time we would get around
0:32:36 to convicting him after he has served and then he’s an 82-year-old man, like I’m very doubtful
0:32:44 that there is still going to be the political will four years from now. But it’s such an unprecedented
0:32:49 set of circumstances that I think that’s a question we answer four years from now.
0:32:56 So one of the things that I really enjoy, and maybe enjoy is the wrong word, but one of the
0:33:02 things that I appreciate about when we are both in the office at the same time is that we, you know,
0:33:08 with clear eyes can think about the worst case scenarios for democracy together. And you know,
0:33:12 we got a pretty do-me-question and I want to play it for you.
0:33:17 Hey, my name is Luke. I’m from Michigan. I waffle between anxiety and trying to reassure
0:33:23 myself that everything is going to be okay. I’m not a Trump fan and I do think he’ll be horrible
0:33:30 for democracy. But the main question is, what can I do for the next four years to ensure that he
0:33:36 does not hold on to power, to hang on to power indefinitely? How can I prevent that from happening?
0:33:45 I mean, I think that’s a difficult question. We have a constitutional system that lays out
0:33:53 very clear processes by which you can weaken the incumbent party. The next major roadblock
0:33:57 where Donald Trump’s climb to power can be stopped is the midterm election.
0:34:02 You know, among other things in the midterm election, it might be possible for Democrats to
0:34:07 take the Senate. And once they take the Senate, that means they can stop all Trump judicial
0:34:13 confirmations. You know, no more people getting on the Supreme Court saying that Donald Trump’s
0:34:18 allowed to do crimes while he’s in office. Like, that is the biggest thing that could happen to
0:34:23 try to halt this man’s rise to power, electing a Congress that will check this man.
0:34:29 What outstanding questions do you have right now? We’re going to talk to some other people
0:34:32 in our newsroom. Is there anything you want to know from them?
0:34:40 I mean, the biggest question that I have is just how aggressive is Donald Trump going to be? Like,
0:34:45 is he actually going to bring criminal charges against his political rivals? Is he actually
0:34:51 going to be able to round up the millions and millions of undocumented immigrants who live
0:34:56 in the United States and find a way to deport all of them? And so the question I have is, I mean,
0:35:01 I don’t know which of the specific things that Donald Trump has said he wants to do are actually
0:35:08 going to get done. After the break, I call up a colleague who’s looked into just that.
0:35:14 So hugely important. I think it’s the story right now. A lot of people are going to focus
0:35:18 on the politics for understandable reasons, but the policy is the thing that’s going to govern
0:35:22 all of our lives for the next four years. And it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary
0:35:30 Trump’s policy agenda is. Stay with us.
0:35:39 We’re back. You’re listening to Explain It to Me. Before the break, I talked with my
0:35:44 colleague Ian about the courts and a second Trump presidency. What Ian wants to know is if
0:35:49 Trump will follow through on all those campaign promises he made. Lucky for us, we have another
0:35:53 co-worker who has thoughts on that. And he was also in the office on election night.
0:36:00 Zach Beecham, I’m a senior correspondent here at Vox. It is 9.09 p.m. on the east coast.
0:36:07 So like everybody else, I’m watching those seven key swing states, right? And we’re all trying to
0:36:11 see how they’re fitting in with each other. And as we speak right now, most of them don’t have
0:36:16 sufficient data for us to be really confident about what’s happening. Well, it is about 17 hours
0:36:24 later and we know what happened. And in fact, we got a call from a listener about what happened.
0:36:32 I want to go ahead and play it for you. Hey, this is Alex from Kansas City. I just wanted to call
0:36:39 and ask, how are those Democrats feeling right now? I bet they’re crying, huh? I bet they’re crying,
0:36:47 huh? Trump 2024. You’ve been monitoring right-wing media. I’m curious
0:36:53 what the reaction to the results has been like there. Is it similar to Alex’s energy?
0:37:00 Yeah. A lot of the American right is oriented around a shared antipathy towards the left.
0:37:07 Their glee is in part so many of these people being disappointed and humiliated and angry. And
0:37:13 it’s not just like a belief that Trump has done something impressive. It’s that he’s beaten
0:37:18 the people that they really hate. And it’s quite a source of joy for a lot of people on the right.
0:37:23 Yeah. So you cover Republicans in the right. And from your perspective,
0:37:28 how did this win happen? How did Donald Trump win the reelection?
0:37:32 If I have to give you a short explanation for what happened, a simple one sentence,
0:37:37 it’s that people don’t like incumbents, right? This is true not just in the United States,
0:37:43 but across the world, right? 2024 is the biggest year of elections in human history. Never have
0:37:48 more people voted than they have this year. And what we saw in the United States fits that theory
0:37:53 to a T, right? Across the board, there was a shift in the U.S. Like if you look at this,
0:37:57 the Washington Post has this really handy map where you can look at county results and they
0:38:02 can show you at the county level whether those counties swung left or right relative to the
0:38:08 2020 election. And if you look at it, it’s just a sea of red, right? Everywhere with a few exceptions.
0:38:13 Americans were more inclined to vote for a Republican than a Democrat. And to me,
0:38:16 that’s like the number one analytic question that you have to answer is what theory do you
0:38:22 have that can explain nearly everybody moving in one direction. And the answer is that most people
0:38:26 are dissatisfied with how things were going, right? Exit polls are unreliable for subgroups,
0:38:30 especially, but one consistent finding, which makes me have a little bit more confidence in them,
0:38:35 is that 70 plus percent of Americans think the country was on the wrong track or not doing well.
0:38:43 And that to me is the story of the election. I’m also curious about Donald Trump, the man.
0:38:48 A question we got about President-elect Trump, we got on Instagram from a Vox follower was,
0:38:53 what am I missing? Why is he so great? And there really is this cult of personality around Trump.
0:38:59 He has stands. It’s up there with the Beehive and the Swifties. What is up with Donald Trump’s appeal?
0:39:09 So Trump connects on a really fundamental level with a lot of voters, right? Part of it is that
0:39:15 he’s been a celebrity for several decades now, and he has a kind of magnetic charisma honed in
0:39:19 all of his public appearances over all this time that draws people to him. And like, I don’t really
0:39:25 know how to explain charisma. It’s hard to describe Riz, you know? But yeah, but like you see it,
0:39:29 right? If you watch him speak, yeah, a lot of the time he’s boring, but then he does like these
0:39:35 weird dances and says kind of funny stuff. And people really, they really like that. It makes
0:39:41 them feel exciting to a lot of voters. In my book on right-wing authoritarian politics called
0:39:47 “The Reactionary Spirit,” I argue that the core of Trumpism is a group of Americans who feel like
0:39:53 they have lost what their country was, what the country, what they believe the country ought to
0:39:59 be or what it should be. And this is primarily a reaction to social and demographic change.
0:40:05 And that’s like, I don’t think that that theory is like the only thing that explains the 2024
0:40:10 election results. It especially doesn’t explain like a uniform national shift in Trump’s favor.
0:40:17 But Trump got to this point despite, you know, being in terms of policy, a pretty radical extremist
0:40:22 because he got to the head of one of our two major parties, which normalizes and basically by default.
0:40:27 And he did that by expertly manipulating the grievances of a percentage of the population,
0:40:32 a mostly white, mostly older population. Huh, that makes sense. I’d like to bring you another
0:40:38 question we got from the Vox audience about executive orders, which, you know, our directives,
0:40:43 presidents can issue without waiting on Congress to pass a law. The question reads,
0:40:48 what do we expect to be Trump’s first set of executive orders?
0:40:54 So hugely important. I think it’s the story right now. A lot of people are going to focus
0:40:58 on the politics for understandable reasons, but the policy is the thing that’s going to
0:41:02 govern all of our lives for the next four years. And it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary
0:41:09 Trump’s policy agenda is. I would pick three policy areas to focus on here, right? The first is
0:41:14 trade, right? Trump has promised across the board tariffs, universal or near universal,
0:41:19 on all imported goods. I would expect that to happen immediately. The question is what level
0:41:24 they’ll be at? Regardless of the number across the board tariffs will do pretty significant
0:41:30 economic damage pretty quickly. It’s one of those areas where Trump has a very idiosyncratic view
0:41:35 that’s aligned against basically all economists left and right on this particular issue.
0:41:40 The second one, Trump, the Trump team is already talking about this right after the election is
0:41:46 mass deportations. I don’t know how mass is mass, but they have a lot of very specific plans about
0:41:52 how to restructure the way in which the federal government does deportations to be able to reach
0:41:58 a much larger group of undocumented immigrants much more quickly. So, I mean, we’re possibly talking
0:42:04 millions. And the third major area is staffing of the federal government. Tell me more about that.
0:42:09 Right? Trump has said that he will re-implement something called Schedule F immediately upon
0:42:14 taking power. Schedule F is a reclassification of parts of the federal civil service that
0:42:21 makes people whose jobs were previously non-political into political appointees. Trump can fire this
0:42:28 by some estimates. It’s well over 50,000 people that would be fired. And, you know, if Trump can
0:42:34 replace career civil servants in key positions with his people, he’ll be able to do a lot more
0:42:39 across the board and many of his other plans, especially plans to, for example, open investigations
0:42:45 into the Bidens and into Harris. So that is really sort of a lynchpin of the broader Trump agenda.
0:42:53 Yeah, I’m curious if any of this is actually going to happen. I mean, politicians say they’ll
0:43:00 do stuff all the time that they never do. And I think with Trump, it’s especially hard to tell
0:43:05 what’s real and what’s not because he’s just such a showman. Like a lot of times, he does it just
0:43:10 for the shock at all. You do it a bit. Yeah. And so how do we know if it’s a bit or not? Or how do
0:43:15 we know if he’s like, no, I’m actually about to do this? Well, you know, sometimes that can be
0:43:19 really hard to tell, right? Like one policy I’ve struggled with a lot, invading Mexico, that is
0:43:24 sending U.S. special forces into Mexico to fight drug cartels. Like that sounds totally nuts.
0:43:29 Yeah. Right? It’s just like totally insane. I’ve argued in print that we need to take it seriously,
0:43:32 but that doesn’t mean I think it’s guaranteed that it’s going to happen.
0:43:37 These other three things that I mentioned, though, those are all extremely likely to happen.
0:43:43 Right? One consistent finding in the political science literature, which I think maybe is a
0:43:47 little bit surprising to people, is that presidents tend to keep their promises.
0:43:51 Right? It’s not that they’re always telling the truth all the time. I mean, Trump lies constantly,
0:43:55 but when they say they want to do something, they’re stating their intent to do it.
0:44:00 Right? They’re not just saying it to say it. Right? It’s that they think that this is an
0:44:05 important part of their governing agenda. And by all accounts, on those three areas, immigration,
0:44:12 trade, and control of the federal government, like Trump is speaking for a place of conviction here.
0:44:16 He changes his mind all the time on different stuff. Like abortion is a great example.
0:44:19 You know, he’s swung wildly on abortion because I don’t think he really has core
0:44:23 convictions on that issue. But on trade and immigration, he’s been consistent for a very
0:44:28 long time. And on control of the federal government, his number one preoccupation is that throughout
0:44:34 his time in the White House and since has been that government wasn’t loyal to him personally,
0:44:39 that he couldn’t do whatever he wanted, that were people getting in his way. And now he’s in a
0:44:47 position to stop that. And even as he has said many times, to get retribution for the prosecution
0:44:53 and investigations into him that happened in his years out of power. And there’s just no
0:44:57 doubt in my mind that he’s going to pursue that. The only question is how effectively
0:45:00 he’ll be able to accomplish his goals and all of these things. And that I don’t have a clear answer
0:45:08 to. So, Democrats have been saying for a year that this election 2024 is the most important
0:45:14 election of our lifetimes. Now that it’s over, was it? How should we think about that part of it
0:45:22 now that the election’s done? I mean, I think they were right. And I think that that’s scary.
0:45:29 Because people did say that, but it was just clear from the way that the election was being
0:45:34 talked about the way it was being covered. People weren’t feeling the same level of
0:45:42 existential significance that they did in, let’s say 2020. People have difficulty imagining that
0:45:49 they’ve lost something until it’s actually lost. And I think we saw this pretty clearly with abortion.
0:45:56 For most Americans, the idea of Roe versus Wade being repealed was abstract until it was actually
0:46:01 repealed. And then we saw this massive political movement oriented around protecting abortion
0:46:06 rights and significant victories for abortion rights referenda, which continued in this election,
0:46:15 even though they lost some. But still, a majority won this time around. And I think that’s true with
0:46:21 a lot of things, not just rights that you can lose, but also basic elements of government
0:46:25 that we take for granted. And then just go on down the list with different policies.
0:46:32 It’s hard to imagine what it would mean for millions of people who are either are or alleged
0:46:36 to be undocumented immigrants being rounded up and put into camps. I mean, they’ve literally
0:46:40 talked about camps for these people. I’m not making this up. This isn’t anti-Trump hysteria.
0:46:45 It’s what Trump plans call for in order to house all of the people that they’re detaining,
0:46:51 putting them in camps and then deporting them. That is something that feels so removed from our
0:46:57 day-to-day experience of life that you can’t integrate it. You can’t even really process it.
0:47:03 But if we start to get massive measles outbreaks because RFK Jr. has destroyed our vaccine
0:47:08 infrastructure, if the American economy goes into a tailspin because Trump institutes these
0:47:13 wild and crazy tariffs, if you start to see your friends and neighbors getting thrown into camps,
0:47:21 people will realize that they’ve lost something really significant. But it just, it’s,
0:47:26 the hypothetical messaging didn’t go through. And now I fear we’re going to have to live through
0:47:32 the hypothetical. All right, Zach, thank you so much for explaining this to us. Thank you,
0:47:43 JQ. I’m always happy to chat with you. That’s it for this episode of Explain It To Me.
0:47:48 Thank you to all of you who called in with your questions. We hope to answer more of
0:47:52 them in the coming weeks. We got a bunch about ranked choice voting in particular,
0:47:58 so we’ll dedicate a whole episode to that soon. If you have a question about the election or
0:48:11 about literally anything else, please give us a call. 1-800-618-8545. We’d love to hear from you.
0:48:23 Our producers this week were Sylphie Lalonde and Gabrielle Burbay. Anouk Dousseau, Sarah Shweppy,
0:48:29 and Katie Pindsy Moog fact-checked this episode. It was edited by Jorge Just, Julia Longoria,
0:48:34 and Natalie Jennings. Mixing sound design and engineering by Christian Ayala.
0:48:41 Our supervising producer is Carla Javier. Special thanks to you, our listeners, for sending us
0:48:46 questions and making our show possible. If this was valuable to you, please consider supporting
0:48:52 this work financially by becoming a Vox member. Details, perks, and more at vox.com/members.
0:49:03 I’m Jonklin Hill, and I’ll talk to you soon. Take care out there.
0:49:09 First, will you tell me about your influence on tonight’s election dinner?
0:49:16 It was fully my decision. I rigged the vote. I first started off by shocking people with
0:49:22 the suggestion that we get pasta, and I knew in the end I wanted Chaya. Throughout, like, a
0:49:27 spoiler third-party DC vegan, which we’ve had before, very delicious, but I knew where this was
0:49:32 going to end. Oh my god, I was there when you threw out pasta, the fact that this was your plan all
0:49:37 along. I tricked everyone, and then I stopped the count.
0:49:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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0:01:20 – There are several terms in our political vocabulary
0:01:24 that have been stretched to the point of incoherence.
0:01:28 Marxist and Orwellian spring immediately to mind,
0:01:32 but at this moment, I’m not sure any term
0:01:33 can compete with woke.
0:01:39 Whether you’re on the left or the right,
0:01:42 whether you’re pro or anti-woke,
0:01:44 or even if you’re not especially political
0:01:46 and don’t follow this stuff,
0:01:49 woke is a word you simply cannot escape.
0:01:54 The problem is that woke has become a catch-all term,
0:01:59 often deployed in bad faith to smear or dismiss anything
0:02:03 that has any vague association with progressive politics.
0:02:07 As a result, anytime you venture into an argument
0:02:10 about wokeness, it becomes hopelessly entangled
0:02:12 in this broader cultural battle.
0:02:17 However, wokeness is not purely a figment
0:02:19 of the reactionary mind.
0:02:23 Even if we can’t quite define it,
0:02:27 it refers to something actually happening in the world.
0:02:29 And if we can cut through all the bullshit
0:02:32 and all the bad faith, it’s worth understanding
0:02:34 what it is and where it comes from.
0:02:40 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:43 (upbeat music)
0:02:53 Today’s guest is Musa Algarvi.
0:02:56 He’s a journalist, a professor at Stony Brook University,
0:02:59 and the author of a very interesting new book
0:03:01 called We Have Never Been Woke,
0:03:04 The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
0:03:09 Musa’s book is a serious effort
0:03:12 to understand this movement and the effects it is having
0:03:15 or not having on our society.
0:03:20 And whether one agrees with all of his conclusions or not,
0:03:23 it’s impossible to read this book and not walk away
0:03:27 feeling like you know more than you did before you read it.
0:03:28 So I invited him on the show
0:03:31 to talk about what wokeism means,
0:03:35 why it’s not as new and unprecedented as people think,
0:03:38 and why the social and economic forces driving it
0:03:40 are so complicated.
0:03:47 Musa Algarvi, welcome to the show.
0:03:47 – It’s great to be here.
0:03:50 Thank you so much for having me.
0:03:51 – I’m glad we’re finally doing this.
0:03:58 Wokeism is a topic I’ve mostly avoided on the show,
0:04:01 not because I don’t think it refers
0:04:03 to a real thing happening in the world,
0:04:06 but because most of the discourse around it
0:04:11 is so tedious and circular or bad faith.
0:04:15 And if your book was merely a defense of wokeness
0:04:17 or an attack on it,
0:04:18 I don’t think I would have invited you on,
0:04:21 but it’s so much more than that.
0:04:25 In your mind, what makes it a fresh contribution?
0:04:28 – I think one of the big contributions of the book
0:04:31 is that it helps contextualize the present moment
0:04:32 in a different way.
0:04:35 It shows that what’s happening after 2010
0:04:36 is actually a case of something.
0:04:38 And in fact, there have been three other
0:04:39 previous awokenings.
0:04:41 And by comparing and contrasting these cases,
0:04:44 we can actually get a lot of insight into questions
0:04:46 like why do these awokenings come about?
0:04:47 Why do they end?
0:04:48 Do they change anything?
0:04:51 And these kinds of questions,
0:04:53 instead of trying to just explain things
0:04:54 that are happening today,
0:04:57 in terms of other things that are also happening today,
0:05:00 to kind of step back and take a more
0:05:02 kind of structural look at what’s happening.
0:05:04 So I think that’s one of the big values.
0:05:06 Primarily what it’s trying to do
0:05:10 is this deep study of contemporary inequalities,
0:05:13 how they come about, who benefits from them and how.
0:05:17 And here I think it makes an important contribution as well,
0:05:21 because especially in symbolic capitalist spaces,
0:05:26 so spaces like higher ed, journalism, and so on,
0:05:29 when we tell narratives about how various social problems
0:05:31 come about and persist and so on,
0:05:34 the stories that we tell are kind of self-serving.
0:05:39 And in particular, we tend to focus on basically,
0:05:40 the millionaires, the billionaires,
0:05:42 the multinational corporations,
0:05:44 and also those damn Republicans.
0:05:47 And it’s not like those stories are false per se,
0:05:52 but they’re also like really, really, really incomplete.
0:05:55 And so part of what I’m trying to do in this book
0:05:59 is kind of hit those missing notes to show people,
0:06:02 like even if we want to explain the actions
0:06:04 of the millionaires and the billionaires
0:06:07 and the multinational corporations, for instance,
0:06:11 it’s actually impossible to explain how any of the stuff
0:06:15 that those actors do actually happens without us.
0:06:18 It’s with us and through us that they accomplish those goals.
0:06:21 And then the last contribution, I think,
0:06:23 is it’s a cool study of the political economy
0:06:26 of the knowledge professions.
0:06:29 So how does the changing kind of power and wealth
0:06:31 of the symbolic professions
0:06:32 and the people who take part in them,
0:06:36 how does that relate to our changing
0:06:38 kind of moral and political narratives
0:06:42 and the ways that we behave politically in society
0:06:45 and our ideological alignments and things like that?
0:06:48 – I wanna get into the meat of the case you’re making here.
0:06:55 Let’s just do a little bit of table setting to ground us.
0:07:00 And I realize every interviewer is probably asking you
0:07:03 to define wokeness.
0:07:08 And in the book, you don’t offer a precise definition
0:07:12 because it’s a contested term and like many contested terms,
0:07:15 it can’t be clearly defined.
0:07:18 However, I do think it will help
0:07:22 if you explain why you resisted defining it
0:07:26 and then at least give me the most general account
0:07:29 you can of wokeness so that we at least know
0:07:32 what we’re talking about for the rest of this conversation
0:07:33 or people know what you’re talking about.
0:07:34 – Yeah, absolutely.
0:07:38 So, yeah, there’s this move in the discourse
0:07:40 that I think is really unhelpful.
0:07:43 That’s basically like, if you can’t provide
0:07:45 a crisp analytic definition of something,
0:07:47 then you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
0:07:49 You’re not talking about anything.
0:07:51 There’s no there, there, it’s a moral panic or whatever.
0:07:53 And I think that’s a really bad way
0:07:55 to think about how language works.
0:07:57 Like the idea that we need necessary
0:08:00 and sufficient conditions for something
0:08:02 in order to understand what it is is just false.
0:08:05 So what I don’t do in the book is provide that
0:08:09 but I do provide kind of a rich thick description
0:08:12 about what different stakeholders seem to mean
0:08:14 when they refer to wokeness.
0:08:16 And there, there’s actually a lot of agreement
0:08:17 and there are a whole bunch of things
0:08:19 that kind of people across the political
0:08:22 and ideological spectrum seem to have in mind
0:08:25 when they’re talking about this contested term.
0:08:27 I don’t think they cohere into a definition
0:08:29 but it is the case that stakeholders
0:08:32 kind of across the political and ideological spectrum,
0:08:35 there is a kind of broad zone of agreement
0:08:38 of kinds of things that we’re talking about
0:08:39 when we talk about wokeness.
0:08:41 And I’ll say during the last period of a wokening
0:08:43 in the late 80s to early 90s,
0:08:44 instead of talking about wokeness,
0:08:46 they talked about political correctness.
0:08:50 But it was, but it was like the same constellation
0:08:53 of attitudes and dispositions more or less.
0:08:56 And the dynamics of how that word played out
0:08:59 in the public unfolded in much the same way.
0:09:01 So at first there was a lot of people
0:09:03 who identified as politically correct
0:09:07 in an ironic way to mean my views,
0:09:09 my moral and political views are correct.
0:09:14 And other people started to associate PC culture
0:09:15 with this kind of sanctimonious,
0:09:19 purely symbolic form of activism.
0:09:23 And then gradually the right seized upon this dispute
0:09:25 within the left and started attacking anything
0:09:27 they didn’t like as PC.
0:09:30 And then it became difficult for anyone
0:09:32 to associate unironically
0:09:34 with the term politically correctness
0:09:36 and the term political correctness became
0:09:38 almost purely a term of derision.
0:09:40 And even to be politically incorrect,
0:09:42 it took on a somewhat positive valency
0:09:45 at people like Bill Maher who had a whole show
0:09:47 politically incorrect or something like that.
0:09:50 And you see the same thing playing out with woke today.
0:09:55 So increasingly no one self identifies as woke
0:09:57 in an unironic way.
0:10:01 And so the same kind of dynamic that we saw playing out
0:10:03 in the last awokening around political correctness
0:10:06 is now playing out in a very similar way
0:10:07 around the term woke.
0:10:09 And in the next awokening, the term woke
0:10:11 probably won’t be part of it.
0:10:15 There’ll be some probably some other term as this one,
0:10:18 some other term that activists used to define themselves
0:10:20 in their approach to politics and so on.
0:10:26 – Okay, so we’re in the midst of the fourth awokening,
0:10:28 according to you that we’ve had in this country.
0:10:30 There’s one in the 20s or 30s.
0:10:32 There’s another one in the 60s.
0:10:36 There’s the one you’re just talking about in the 80s, 90s.
0:10:38 And then this current one,
0:10:41 what do all these periods have in common?
0:10:45 What is the thread that ties them together?
0:10:49 The tweet length answer is that these periods
0:10:54 of awokening happen when there’s a big crisis for elites
0:10:59 where they are expecting a certain life
0:11:03 and it seems like they won’t be able to live that life.
0:11:05 One thread that cuts across all four awokenings
0:11:09 is that they tend to occur during these periods
0:11:10 of elite overproduction.
0:11:14 And so elite overproduction is a term that’s taken
0:11:16 from sociologist Jack Goldstone,
0:11:18 then historian Peter Turchin.
0:11:20 And it refers to a condition
0:11:22 where society is producing more people
0:11:25 that have a reasonable expectation to be elites.
0:11:28 Then we have the capacity to actually give them
0:11:31 the elite lifestyles and positions that they’re expecting.
0:11:33 So you have growing numbers of people
0:11:34 who did everything right.
0:11:37 They got good grades, they went to college,
0:11:39 they went to the right colleges,
0:11:40 they studied the right majors
0:11:43 and they’re expecting six figure salaries
0:11:45 and to be able to have a house
0:11:47 and to get married and settled down
0:11:48 and have kids and a standard of living
0:11:50 that’s close to or better
0:11:51 than what their parents experienced.
0:11:54 And all of a sudden they’re not able to do any of that.
0:11:56 When you have growing numbers of people
0:11:58 in that kind of a condition,
0:12:01 what they tend to do is indict the social order
0:12:02 that they think failed them
0:12:05 and try to tear down some of the existing elites
0:12:07 to make space for people like themselves.
0:12:09 So that’s at their core,
0:12:11 what I argue is happening in awokenings.
0:12:16 The two factors that cut across all four awokenings
0:12:19 are the elite overproduction
0:12:22 and this other factor, popular immiseration.
0:12:24 So elite overproduction,
0:12:28 one reason why that’s not enough
0:12:31 to predict awokenings, why it’s not sufficient
0:12:37 is because often when elites are having a tough time,
0:12:40 it’s hard to get anyone to care.
0:12:42 And that’s because there’s this phenomenon
0:12:45 where the fortunes of elites and non-elites
0:12:47 tend to operate counter-cyclicly.
0:12:49 When elites are having a tough time,
0:12:51 it’s hard to get anyone to care.
0:12:53 No one’s breaking out a tiny violin
0:12:55 and going, “Oh, poor elite guy,
0:12:58 he has to live a normal life and get a normal job.
0:12:59 Like everyone else.
0:13:01 Oh, let me play you a sad song, right?”
0:13:03 So if times are pretty good for everyone else
0:13:05 but bad for elites, no one cares.
0:13:07 But there are these moments
0:13:09 when the trajectories get collapsed,
0:13:13 when things have been kind of bad and growing worse
0:13:15 for ordinary people for a while
0:13:18 and all of a sudden they’re bad for a lot of elites too,
0:13:20 those are the moments when awokenings happen
0:13:24 because the frustrated elite aspirants
0:13:26 not only have a motive,
0:13:29 but they also have a means to really mess with the system
0:13:32 ’cause there’s this huge base of other people in society
0:13:34 who are also really frustrated
0:13:35 with the way things are going,
0:13:38 who also have a bone to pick
0:13:40 with the people who are kind of running the show.
0:13:41 And so they have a more leverage,
0:13:43 these frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage
0:13:46 over the system than they otherwise might.
0:13:48 – Let me push on something for a second.
0:13:51 The case you make in the book is that the elites
0:13:53 and you and I are technically part of this group
0:13:55 because of what we do,
0:13:59 like to imagine that we’re part of the 99%
0:14:01 and it’s the one percenters who are the real elites
0:14:05 when in fact it’s really the top 20%
0:14:08 who are hoarding most of the power and wealth.
0:14:13 Isn’t it true though that much of what you call
0:14:15 the symbolic capitalist class,
0:14:17 that’s the term we’re about to define right after this,
0:14:19 but for now let’s just say people like me and you
0:14:22 and journalists, academics, bureaucrats, lawyers,
0:14:25 corporate management types and so on.
0:14:29 Most of us exist in a kind of precarity
0:14:32 that is much closer to the lived experience
0:14:34 of the middle and working classes
0:14:37 than it is to the tech CEOs or the hedge fund managers.
0:14:40 You and I have much more in common with a school teacher
0:14:43 or a firefighter or a retail manager
0:14:46 than we do with Mark Zuckerberg or Jay-Z
0:14:49 or whoever the hell is running Goldman Sachs these days.
0:14:51 It seems to me that in theory at least
0:14:53 there’s more convergence of interest here
0:14:56 than your thesis might suggest.
0:14:57 What am I missing?
0:14:58 – I mean, I think that’s definitely how we like
0:15:01 to think of ourselves, but as I show in the book,
0:15:04 one of the problems that we have is that we compare
0:15:07 ourselves, I think too much to people like Mark Zuckerberg
0:15:09 and go, “Oh, well, I’m just a normie,”
0:15:11 rather than comparing ourselves to normies.
0:15:14 So I’ll give an example I talk about in the book
0:15:18 is when you look at adjunct professors.
0:15:22 So adjunct professors relative to tenure line professors
0:15:23 are clearly exploited.
0:15:28 They make a lot less money for doing the same kinds of work.
0:15:31 They have no say over faculty governance.
0:15:33 They have really precarious labor contracts.
0:15:35 They have no academic freedom to speak of
0:15:37 as I discovered firsthand when I did that job.
0:15:38 – I was one, it sucked.
0:15:44 – But it’s also the case that if you are
0:15:47 a full-time adjunct instructor on average,
0:15:51 you make much more than the typical American worker
0:15:53 and you also have much better working conditions.
0:15:55 You have much higher social status and so on.
0:15:58 And this is part of the reason why people choose to adjunct
0:16:00 instead of becoming a manager at Waffle House or something
0:16:03 is because they don’t wanna be those people.
0:16:07 The idea of working as a manager in a Waffle House
0:16:08 or something like that,
0:16:13 they would rather struggle as an adjunct at Berkeley
0:16:16 than to be a shoe salesman.
0:16:18 They don’t see themselves in the same boat.
0:16:20 They don’t wanna be in the same boat.
0:16:23 They passionately don’t wanna be in the same boat.
0:16:26 And even in terms of things like culture,
0:16:30 in many respects, actually we are closer to people
0:16:32 like Mark Zuckerberg and those folks.
0:16:34 And in fact, increasingly the millionaires
0:16:37 and the billionaires are drawn from us anyway,
0:16:39 Zuckerberg being a great example.
0:16:42 Like for instance, take journalists.
0:16:44 So journalism used to be a job
0:16:47 where you had decent numbers of working class people.
0:16:49 That’s not the case so much anymore.
0:16:52 Both because of credential requirements,
0:16:56 like journalists are increasingly focused on
0:17:00 only people with college degrees can be journalists
0:17:03 and especially people who graduate from elite schools.
0:17:07 And so like in a world where you need to have
0:17:09 a college degree and a college degree in the right majors
0:17:11 and from the right schools in order to be a journalist.
0:17:13 And in order to be a journalist,
0:17:15 you also have to basically work for free
0:17:16 in really expensive cities
0:17:18 to get your foot in the door and so on.
0:17:20 Then the only people who can really be journalists
0:17:22 are people who are relatively affluent.
0:17:24 And that has important implications
0:17:26 for the way we do our job.
0:17:30 So for instance, it’s holding the elite to account
0:17:31 plays out much different.
0:17:33 If the people you’re supposed to be holding to account
0:17:35 are your classmates and your friends
0:17:38 and your lovers and your neighbors versus
0:17:40 if you have this kind of sociological distance
0:17:41 between you and the elites.
0:17:48 And the perspectives of non-elite people
0:17:51 are also not particularly present in our institution.
0:17:55 So a great example, there’s an essay by Bertrand Cooper
0:17:57 called “Who Gets to Create Black Culture?”
0:18:00 And in this essay, he points out,
0:18:04 like if George Floyd was alive after he was killed,
0:18:09 he became the New York Times, the Washington Post, HBO,
0:18:12 everyone, George Floyd, George Floyd, George Floyd.
0:18:13 If George Floyd hadn’t been killed,
0:18:16 but he wanted to write for the New York Times,
0:18:18 there’s zero chance he would have had to,
0:18:20 he would have been able to write for the New York Times.
0:18:21 The New York Times doesn’t care
0:18:24 what people like George Floyd think about anything.
0:18:27 Their perspectives are not valid.
0:18:28 They’re not valued.
0:18:32 Ironically, George Floyd became someone who mattered to us
0:18:34 after he became a victim of state violence
0:18:37 and we could use his death in our power struggles.
0:18:41 Until that point, George Floyd and his perspectives
0:18:42 don’t matter to us.
0:18:43 People like George Floyd don’t matter to us.
0:18:45 We don’t engage with those people.
0:18:47 We don’t uplift their perspectives.
0:18:50 And so actually, I just don’t think it’s true
0:18:52 that we have a lot in common with ordinary,
0:18:56 not only do we not have a lot in common with ordinary people
0:19:00 in terms of our interests and social networks
0:19:02 and things like that, but we don’t want to,
0:19:03 even when you look at things like our moral
0:19:05 and political views.
0:19:07 Our moral and political views and the ways
0:19:10 that we engage in politics are far out of step
0:19:14 with the way that the rest of Americans talk
0:19:15 and think about these social issues,
0:19:18 but are actually much closer to the ways
0:19:19 that millionaires and billionaires
0:19:22 and those kinds of people talk and think about politics.
0:19:23 – Do you think the New York Times
0:19:26 doesn’t give a shit about George Floyd
0:19:27 until he’s been killed by the state,
0:19:31 or is it that the audience won’t pay attention
0:19:33 until that’s the case?
0:19:34 – I think it’s kind of both.
0:19:36 And part of the reason it’s both actually,
0:19:38 I talk about this a bit in the book,
0:19:41 is that the people who produce and consume these narratives
0:19:44 are increasingly the same people.
0:19:47 It’s the same slice of society that’s producing
0:19:49 almost all of this work in the symbolic professions
0:19:51 and they’re almost the exact same
0:19:53 as the audience that’s consuming them
0:19:56 in terms of where they live, the professions they work in,
0:19:57 what their values are,
0:20:01 the kinds of educational background they have, and so on.
0:20:04 It’s this really incestuous relationship increasingly
0:20:06 between writers and audiences
0:20:07 where they’re virtually identical.
0:20:10 So I think it’s the case that a lot of the writers
0:20:13 don’t really, and editors and stuff,
0:20:16 don’t really have their finger on the pulse of normies,
0:20:17 but I think it’s also true
0:20:19 that the audience of the New York Times
0:20:20 doesn’t particularly care about normies
0:20:22 and their problems either.
0:20:25 – I think there’s just something undeniably true about that.
0:20:29 There’s a particularly depressing section of the book,
0:20:31 for me at least, where you’re talking about
0:20:36 how much of what we think of as the discourse,
0:20:39 nonfiction books, newspapers, journals, magazines,
0:20:44 is mostly just elites talking to other elites
0:20:47 with the pretense that it matters to or is even seen by.
0:20:50 The rest of the country, but it really isn’t for the most part.
0:20:53 So a lot of it is just masturbatory.
0:20:56 – Yeah, it matters especially for the work
0:21:01 that’s trying to understand and mitigate social problems,
0:21:04 because a lot of the people that we’re trying to help
0:21:06 are just not part of the conversation.
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0:25:16 (gentle music)
0:25:22 So this would be a good time
0:25:25 to explain this term, symbolic capitalism,
0:25:29 because the thing people are constantly puzzling over
0:25:33 is that the elites in our society
0:25:37 who benefit most from the systemic inequalities,
0:25:41 mostly highly educated white liberals,
0:25:44 are also the ones most exercised
0:25:45 about all of these inequalities.
0:25:49 Now this appears to be a contradiction on the face of it,
0:25:51 but it’s really not for you, right?
0:25:54 Like this is just a game symbolic capitalist play
0:25:56 with each other.
0:25:58 It’s not just a game.
0:26:01 So one of the ways I think the discourse sometimes
0:26:05 goes awry is that there’s this kind of narrative tendency
0:26:08 that we have where we think if we can expose
0:26:10 that someone has an interest in doing something
0:26:13 or believing something, that they must not be sincere.
0:26:15 Right, not true.
0:26:17 Yeah, and I think that’s a bad way of thinking about thinking
0:26:20 because our cognitive and perceptual systems,
0:26:23 I argue, are kind of fundamentally geared
0:26:25 towards perceiving and thinking about the world
0:26:28 in ways that enhance our interests and further our goals.
0:26:30 And if we take that research seriously,
0:26:33 then we would see that there’s actually not a contradiction
0:26:36 between sincerely believing something
0:26:39 and also mobilizing that belief
0:26:41 in the service of your self-interest.
0:26:43 In fact, if you had an interest in believing something,
0:26:46 you would believe it even more sincerely
0:26:47 and you would probably try to get other people
0:26:49 to believe it as well.
0:26:52 I just take it for granted that when we say
0:26:54 we want the poor to be uplifted,
0:26:56 that we want people who are marginalized
0:26:57 and disadvantaged in society
0:27:00 to live lives of dignity and inclusion.
0:27:02 I don’t think we’re being insincere about that,
0:27:04 but that’s not our only sincere commitment.
0:27:06 We also sincerely want to be elites,
0:27:10 which is to say we think that our voice
0:27:12 and our preferences should matter
0:27:15 more than the person checking us out at Stop and Shop
0:27:20 or the gas station attendant when we fill up the tank.
0:27:23 And we think that we should have a higher standard of living
0:27:27 than someone who’s flipping burgers at McDonald’s
0:27:29 or selling shoes at Dillard’s.
0:27:31 We strongly want our children to reproduce
0:27:34 or have an even stronger social position than ourselves.
0:27:36 And so these drives are in fundamental tension though,
0:27:38 like the drive to be an egalitarian
0:27:41 and the drive to be an elite don’t sit easily with each other.
0:27:45 You can’t really be an egalitarian social climber, right?
0:27:50 And this kind of tension has been
0:27:52 with the symbolic capitalists from the beginning.
0:27:57 It’s a tension that defines this elite constellation
0:28:00 from the beginning through the present.
0:28:02 So yeah, I don’t think it’s a lack of sincerity.
0:28:05 I think it’s just that we have these other sincere drives
0:28:06 and this desire to be elite
0:28:09 when they do come into conflict as they often do.
0:28:14 – So symbolic capitalists are aligned pretty disproportionately
0:28:19 with the political left for reasons you can explain
0:28:22 and you certainly do in the book.
0:28:25 But you also write that at bottom the anti-woke
0:28:28 and the woke actually subscribe
0:28:32 to the same fundamental worldview.
0:28:33 I’d love for you to explain why that is
0:28:34 because I think it’s important.
0:28:38 – Yeah, so one of the things that’s true
0:28:42 of both the woke and the anti-woke crowd
0:28:46 is that they both think that things like symbols
0:28:49 and rhetorics and beliefs and hearts and minds
0:28:52 and things like the names on buildings
0:28:57 and what kinds of things are taught to,
0:29:00 like that these kinds of struggles over culture
0:29:02 and symbols and rhetoric and so on
0:29:05 are like the most important things.
0:29:07 More important than a lot of bread and butter issues
0:29:11 that normal people have to deal with in their day-to-day life.
0:29:16 Like a lot of the anti-woke people describe wokeness
0:29:20 as this kind of major threat to Western civilization,
0:29:21 to the prevailing order,
0:29:24 like they’re also engaged in this kind of cosmic struggle
0:29:26 in their minds.
0:29:30 And so their ways of thinking about the world and politics
0:29:33 are not much different than the people they’re criticizing.
0:29:36 As I show in the, and I also argue later in the book,
0:29:40 that one thing that you see,
0:29:43 one of the big impacts of awokenings,
0:29:44 they don’t tend to change much
0:29:46 in terms of allocations of resources
0:29:50 for the genuinely disadvantaged in society and so on.
0:29:52 They don’t tend to help the wretched of the earth
0:29:53 in a meaningful, durable way.
0:29:57 One thing that does tend to happen though,
0:30:01 is that these moments of awokening
0:30:04 tend to devolve into cultural wars
0:30:07 and they result in these non-trivial gains for the right,
0:30:09 typically at the ballot box,
0:30:12 and then often the creation
0:30:16 of alternative knowledge economy infrastructures
0:30:23 and kind of durable mistrust of mainstream institutions.
0:30:25 Okay, so why does this happen?
0:30:28 So during these periods of awokening,
0:30:30 symbolic capitalists shift a lot.
0:30:32 Like the ways that we engage in politics,
0:30:33 the way we think about things
0:30:36 and so on, shift in these really radical ways.
0:30:38 And so the gap between us and everyone else
0:30:41 gets bigger than it normally is.
0:30:43 And we recognize that and we assume often
0:30:45 that it’s because those people
0:30:47 are growing more racist or sexist or whatever,
0:30:49 but actually when you look at the trend lines,
0:30:51 they’re not, it’s that we’ve shifted a lot
0:30:53 while they’ve been pretty steady.
0:30:57 But so the gap gets bigger and people care about it more.
0:30:59 And they care about the gap more
0:31:02 because we become more militant during these periods
0:31:04 of villainizing and demonizing and mocking
0:31:06 and trying to censor and so on,
0:31:08 anyone who disagrees with us.
0:31:10 So people notice this gap more
0:31:12 because we’re becoming more confrontational
0:31:14 towards people that we disagree with.
0:31:17 And so this gap and the fact
0:31:18 that people care about the gap more,
0:31:20 it creates an opportunity
0:31:22 for like right aligned political entrepreneurs
0:31:25 to basically campaign by running against us
0:31:28 by bringing people like us under control.
0:31:30 Narratives start to circulate like,
0:31:33 oh, well the mainstream media is just a propaganda arm
0:31:34 for the Democratic Party
0:31:38 or colleges and universities are in the business now
0:31:40 of just indoctrinating young people
0:31:43 rather than teaching them useful knowledge and skills.
0:31:46 And so there tend to be these kinds of movements
0:31:48 by right aligned political folks
0:31:49 then to campaign against people like us.
0:31:53 And you usually see efforts to curb our autonomy,
0:31:55 cut lines of funding and things like that.
0:31:56 And you also see the creation
0:31:59 of these alternative infrastructures.
0:32:03 So after the awokening of the 1960s and 70s, for instance,
0:32:05 there was a perception that higher ed was lost,
0:32:06 can’t fix it.
0:32:09 It’s just captured, it’s ideologically captured.
0:32:11 And so what did people do?
0:32:13 Well, they launched these right aligned think tanks
0:32:14 starting with the Kato Institute
0:32:16 and the Heritage Foundation and so on.
0:32:19 And then in the late 80s, early 90s,
0:32:22 there was a perception that the media was lost.
0:32:23 And so what did they do?
0:32:24 They launched Fox News
0:32:26 in the aftermath of the third grade awokening.
0:32:29 And then finally, in the current moment,
0:32:32 you see these moments to like Elon Musk
0:32:35 trying this anti-woke takeover of Twitter
0:32:38 or Donald Trump trying to launch true social.
0:32:40 And the thing about it is these alternative
0:32:42 knowledge economy infrastructures,
0:32:45 they have an existential stake.
0:32:48 Like the way they make money, the way they keep viewers
0:32:51 is by sowing consistent mistrust in mainstream institutions.
0:32:54 So Fox News, their bread and butter
0:32:56 is all day, every day telling people,
0:32:58 the mainstream media is lying to you.
0:33:00 They don’t care about people like you.
0:33:01 They don’t share your values.
0:33:03 They’re not giving you the whole story.
0:33:04 Like that’s how they make money.
0:33:05 This is all day, every day,
0:33:07 sowing trust in mainstream institution
0:33:09 in order to capture part of our market share.
0:33:14 And so to the extent that we create an opportunity,
0:33:18 a market for these alternative infrastructures
0:33:20 because of the ways that we conduct ourselves
0:33:23 during awokenings, one consequence of that
0:33:25 tends to be kind of durable mistrust
0:33:28 and kind of reduced influence in a long-term way.
0:33:31 We live with the consequences of that for a long time.
0:33:34 – Right, and another consequence is that
0:33:38 the power structure basically remains the same.
0:33:39 – Yeah.
0:33:43 – Can you steelman the case for a minute, at least,
0:33:46 for what we’re calling wokeness
0:33:49 as something potentially more materially significant
0:33:51 than maybe we’re giving it credit for, right?
0:33:55 Is there a politics is downstream of culture argument
0:33:58 that the focus on symbolism and representation
0:34:01 and the rest of it will create
0:34:03 the kinds of cultural changes today
0:34:06 that will lead to concrete material improvements
0:34:08 in people’s lives tomorrow?
0:34:10 Or have you seen enough historical evidence
0:34:13 to suggest that just doesn’t happen?
0:34:14 – By a lot of measures,
0:34:17 like things like black, white income gaps,
0:34:18 mass incarceration rate,
0:34:20 like a lot of these kinds of social problems
0:34:23 that people were upset about in the 1960s
0:34:24 are the same or worse today.
0:34:30 Now, that said, I do think that there are some ways
0:34:32 in which society and culture change
0:34:35 that are just beneficial.
0:34:37 And that are sometimes these changes
0:34:39 are kind of orthogonal to the,
0:34:40 in fact, they’re typically orthogonal
0:34:41 to the great awokenings,
0:34:43 but they are sometimes changes
0:34:45 that were done by symbolic capitalists,
0:34:46 sometimes in between awokenings,
0:34:47 so not during the awokenings,
0:34:52 but like actual good things that have happened
0:34:53 in institutions that we should celebrate.
0:34:57 So for instance, one of the things that bugs me out
0:35:00 in a lot of the conversations around DEI
0:35:04 and merit in higher ed,
0:35:08 is that there’s this kind of wild,
0:35:11 a historical narrative that seems to be at play.
0:35:14 So people will say things like the implicit argument
0:35:16 is like back in the day,
0:35:18 we used to make decisions based on things
0:35:19 like their people’s merit
0:35:22 for hiring and promotion in academia.
0:35:25 And today we pay so much attention to things like identity.
0:35:27 And it’s like,
0:35:30 and that’s kind of a ridiculous, a historical argument.
0:35:34 So until somewhat recently in US history,
0:35:36 pretty much the only people who could be professors
0:35:41 were like straight white men, especially wasp men.
0:35:45 And there were, if you were black, if you were a woman,
0:35:48 if you were like explicitly gay,
0:35:51 if you were even Jewish in many cases,
0:35:56 then you were not eligible to be a professor.
0:35:59 And it wasn’t even hidden, no one was ashamed of this.
0:36:03 Like these were jobs for wasp men.
0:36:07 A lot of jobs weren’t even, it wasn’t until the 1990s.
0:36:11 The 1990s when departments were actually forced
0:36:15 to conduct open searches and list their open positions
0:36:17 publicly until that time,
0:36:19 people would just give lifetime appointments
0:36:21 to people in their network.
0:36:26 And with no competition, meritocratic or otherwise.
0:36:30 And so before, during this period, the good old days,
0:36:31 it was definitely the case
0:36:34 where when the only people who could even be considered
0:36:37 for a job were straight white men
0:36:40 that no one talked about race, gender or sexuality
0:36:42 in hiring and promotion decisions.
0:36:45 ‘Cause why would you, what was there to talk about?
0:36:47 But that didn’t mean that hiring and promotion
0:36:49 wasn’t identity-based, it was more identity-based.
0:36:52 You had to belong to this very specific slice of society
0:36:54 to even be considered for the job.
0:36:57 So to say that that’s not identitarian is wild.
0:37:00 It was only when we stopped taking for granted
0:37:03 that the professors were straight white men,
0:37:06 that the question of who does get to become a professor
0:37:09 and in virtue of what becomes a live question.
0:37:11 – Well, can we also say to the extent
0:37:13 that what you just said is true and it is,
0:37:17 that is in fact a victory
0:37:19 of these sorts of social and cultural movements
0:37:22 that did produce an actual change in society
0:37:24 that was materially significant.
0:37:28 – Yeah, I mean, frankly, like the upshot
0:37:30 is that hiring and promotion today
0:37:32 is actually much more standardized.
0:37:34 It’s much more transparent.
0:37:37 It’s much more metrics focused
0:37:39 than basically it ever has been.
0:37:42 But the thing about it is a lot of these changes,
0:37:45 again, they weren’t necessarily the product of awokenings.
0:37:47 And you can see this for a lot of other positive changes.
0:37:51 So Colleen Aaron, a colleague of mine who’s a sociologist,
0:37:54 she has this great book on the First Step Act.
0:37:58 So the First Step Act was for readers
0:37:59 who are not immediately familiar.
0:38:01 It was one of the most significant pieces
0:38:03 of criminal justice reform that had been published
0:38:06 that had been passed into law in decades.
0:38:09 And as Colleen shows in this book,
0:38:12 the passage of the First Step Act was created
0:38:15 through this careful process of consensus building
0:38:17 across Democrats, Republicans,
0:38:20 all of these community organizations and legislators.
0:38:23 There’s this kind of gradual consensus building effort
0:38:27 that took decades, even before Black Lives Matter
0:38:29 and the Great Awokening and all of this kind of stuff
0:38:32 in conservative and Republican spaces.
0:38:33 There was growing awareness
0:38:35 that there were problems in the criminal justice system.
0:38:37 So it happened to get signed into law
0:38:40 under President Trump during the Great Awokening,
0:38:41 but it wasn’t caused by the Great Awokening.
0:38:46 And in fact, because it happened to get signed into law
0:38:49 during this period of heightened contestation
0:38:52 over social justice, and there were a lot
0:38:55 of symbolic capitalists who were kind of hotdogging,
0:38:59 striking these really extreme positions
0:39:03 that were out of step both with what most of the people
0:39:06 were trying to help want, like defund the police,
0:39:08 close all the prisons and so on.
0:39:13 That this long period of decades on consensus building
0:39:15 was destroyed by the way that symbolic capitalists
0:39:17 conducted herself during the Great Awokening.
0:39:19 And so rather than the First Step Act
0:39:24 being like the cornerstone upon which to build
0:39:26 other criminal justice reform,
0:39:29 it actually basically limped across the finish line
0:39:31 and there hasn’t been much change other than that,
0:39:33 which is to say, there are good things that happen
0:39:36 that symbolic capitalists often take part in,
0:39:38 but they tend to be orthogonal
0:39:39 to these periods of Great Awokening.
0:39:42 If anything, often the periods of Great Awokening
0:39:46 end up messing up social reform movements
0:39:48 that are already underway for a whole host of reasons
0:39:49 I discussed in the book.
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0:41:10 – Robinhood is introducing forecast contracts
0:41:12 so you can trade the presidential election.
0:41:14 Through Robinhood, you can now trade
0:41:16 financial derivatives contracts
0:41:18 on who will win the US presidential election,
0:41:21 Harris or Trump, and watch as contract prices
0:41:24 react to real-time market sentiment.
0:41:28 Each contract you own will pay $1 on January 8th, 2025
0:41:31 if that candidate is confirmed as the next US president
0:41:32 by Congress.
0:41:34 Learn more about the presidential election contracts
0:41:39 on Robinhood at www.robinhood.com/election.
0:41:42 The risk of loss in trading commodity interests
0:41:43 can be substantial.
0:41:44 You should therefore carefully consider
0:41:46 whether such trading is suitable for you
0:41:48 in light of your financial condition.
0:41:50 Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply.
0:41:53 Commodity interest trading is not appropriate for everyone.
0:41:56 Displayed prices are based on real-time market sentiment.
0:41:59 This event contract is offered by Robinhood Derivatives,
0:42:01 a registered Futures Commission merchant and swap firm.
0:42:03 Exchange and regulatory fees apply.
0:42:08 Learn more at www.robinhood.com/election.
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0:42:46 (gentle music)
0:42:52 – You know as well as I do
0:42:54 that anti-wokism has become
0:42:59 its own little cottage industry on the right.
0:43:03 With the caveat that we obviously can’t control
0:43:05 what bad faith actors do with our work
0:43:07 once it’s out in the world.
0:43:10 Do you worry about this book being misinterpreted
0:43:16 and perhaps adopted as a cudgel in the culture war?
0:43:19 – Yeah, I talk about this in the book,
0:43:22 that one of the perennial joys and terrors
0:43:24 of putting ideas out in the world
0:43:26 is after a while they cease to be yours to control.
0:43:28 I worry about that as much as anyone else
0:43:32 but what I tried to focus on for this book
0:43:34 was trying to answer the questions that I had
0:43:37 as kind of fully and comprehensively
0:43:40 and kind of fairly as possible
0:43:44 and kind of let the politics play out how they do.
0:43:47 That’s not my job.
0:43:49 But that said, I also tried,
0:43:53 I think a lot of the anti-woke kind of culture warriors
0:43:55 are gonna have a tough time
0:43:58 really mobilizing the book the way they might hope
0:44:03 both because it has a lot of very critical things
0:44:06 to say about the anti-woke kind of people
0:44:08 and the game that they’re playing as well.
0:44:11 I apply a very symmetrical lens to understanding them
0:44:13 and their behaviors and actions.
0:44:18 And the book also, you know that the reality is
0:44:23 a lot of work like in queer theory or critical race theory
0:44:24 or feminist standpoint epistemology
0:44:28 or post-colonial theory, like these modes of scholarship
0:44:29 deeply inform my own thinking
0:44:34 including on these questions about power and ideology
0:44:35 and how they relate to each other.
0:44:38 In a deep sense, what the book is doing
0:44:41 is taking the arguments from these literatures
0:44:43 to what I perceive to be their logical conclusions
0:44:47 which will lead us to ask of our own
0:44:50 ostensibly emancipatory ideologies
0:44:53 whether or not they might also reflect our class interests
0:44:55 whether or not they actually represent the values
0:44:58 and interests of the people that we’re trying to help
0:45:01 and whether or not like there’s no reason to think
0:45:04 that our own belief systems are exempt
0:45:05 and a lot of these other related literatures
0:45:08 and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them
0:45:11 but in fact to show how they can be valuable.
0:45:14 And so in this and a lot of other ways
0:45:18 I think the book is not easily digestible
0:45:21 into the culture wars and the ways that people might hope.
0:45:23 – You said something a second ago and I’m glad you did
0:45:27 because I wouldn’t normally mention this.
0:45:30 This is not in my little prep doc I have on hand
0:45:35 but it’s relevant and you gestured to it just a second ago
0:45:36 and you also addressed it in the book.
0:45:38 So I’m gonna broach it here.
0:45:44 You’re a black Muslim American challenging
0:45:47 some of the orthodoxies on the left and the right
0:45:51 and there’s this thing that often happens on the left
0:45:55 and I don’t like it where whenever a black person has views
0:45:57 that aren’t doctrinaire or that aren’t the views
0:46:00 of white progressive thinks a black person is supposed
0:46:03 to have they get dismissed or attacked.
0:46:07 And I think you even say in the book that you’re emphasizing
0:46:10 your blackness and the influence of black scholarship
0:46:13 on the book to push readers to listen to you
0:46:16 in a way they might otherwise not.
0:46:18 What is it that you want those readers in particular
0:46:21 to hear that they might otherwise not?
0:46:26 – Yeah, so the thing that they need to hear
0:46:34 is that the values and interests of people like us
0:46:38 are often out of step with those of the people
0:46:39 that we want to help.
0:46:42 Our views of politics, the solutions that we have
0:46:45 to social problems are often out of step
0:46:49 with what other people want and need in some ways
0:46:51 and often ways that cause them harm.
0:46:55 So quick example, I was at a conference
0:46:56 on political polarization.
0:47:00 They had four black people taking part in this conversation
0:47:05 alongside the whites and the four of them
0:47:08 and four of us, there was me who’s half white.
0:47:11 There was two Afro Caribbean folks
0:47:14 and then there was someone who was Kenyan and Nigerian.
0:47:18 So not one person out of the four black people
0:47:21 who were part of this panel, not one person
0:47:23 was a mono racial non-immigrant black person.
0:47:26 They’re the overwhelming majority of America
0:47:28 of America’s black population.
0:47:30 There were nowhere represented on this panel
0:47:32 setting aside the class dimension of it.
0:47:35 But even just looking at ethnicity,
0:47:37 we were not even ethnically remotely representative
0:47:39 of blacks in America.
0:47:43 And in that panel, while unrepresentative
0:47:47 of black America was perfectly representative
0:47:50 of how almost all of the spokespeople
0:47:52 in symbolic capitalist spaces are.
0:47:54 Almost all of the black spokespeople
0:47:58 in symbolic capitalist spaces are either mixed race
0:48:03 or recent immigrant black heritage.
0:48:07 And the few exceptions to that rule tend to be people
0:48:10 who are themselves like from really relatively
0:48:11 affluent backgrounds.
0:48:17 And so the problem with turning to people like myself
0:48:22 to understand like how all black America thinks
0:48:25 is just that we’re not representative of black America.
0:48:26 Our experiences are not the same.
0:48:28 Our challenges are not the same.
0:48:31 Our values and interests are often very different
0:48:32 from the modal black American.
0:48:35 If you look at the modal black American,
0:48:38 black people in America vote overwhelmingly
0:48:40 with the democratic party,
0:48:41 but not because they’re super liberal.
0:48:44 They’re some of the most culturally conservative folks
0:48:46 in the democratic block.
0:48:48 And in fact, this is one of the big problems
0:48:51 that a lot of institutions have
0:48:54 when they try to promote diversity and inclusion
0:48:59 is that we often create these spaces
0:49:02 that are really hostile towards traditional
0:49:05 or socially conservative or religious views
0:49:07 in the name of diversity and inclusion.
0:49:10 But the people who are most affected by that
0:49:13 are people who are already underrepresented in these spaces.
0:49:15 The kinds of people who are already the dominant population,
0:49:18 so relatively affluent, highly educated,
0:49:21 background, urban and suburban white people and so on.
0:49:24 The people who dominate these institutions demographically
0:49:26 also tend to share the dominant ideologies.
0:49:28 They’re products of the same kinds of childhoods
0:49:30 and institutions and so on.
0:49:33 If you look at the Americans
0:49:35 who are most likely to self-identify
0:49:38 as anti-racist, as feminist, as allies to LGBTQ people,
0:49:40 as environmentalists and so on,
0:49:43 it’s highly educated, relatively affluent,
0:49:45 urban and suburban white people.
0:49:47 And so if we create an environment
0:49:49 that if you’re not those things,
0:49:51 you’re gonna be suppressed or villainized
0:49:53 or socially sanctioned and whatever.
0:49:56 The people who are gonna be most adversely affected by that
0:49:59 are gonna be non-traditional students, rural students,
0:50:02 less affluent students, immigrants, non-white students,
0:50:04 religious minority students and so on.
0:50:07 So we do all of these policies
0:50:09 in the name of diversity and inclusion
0:50:12 that are often devastating for the people we want to help.
0:50:15 – Well, look, I’m not gonna ask you to solve
0:50:17 all of our political problems,
0:50:20 but I guess I am curious what you think
0:50:25 or what you see on the other side of this awakening.
0:50:28 I mean, our politics feel pretty dysfunctional right now.
0:50:33 It feels pretty stuck and hopelessly polarized.
0:50:39 Do you have any reason based on how these previous eras
0:50:42 have played out to think we might end up
0:50:45 in a healthier place after all this?
0:50:47 – So in the book, I talk about how there are these things
0:50:51 that are very much the same across the Wokenings.
0:50:55 But there are also a couple of things that are different,
0:50:56 that are different in an important way.
0:51:00 For all the parts of the awakening that’s cyclical,
0:51:03 there is actually this set of trend lines
0:51:05 that I think matters a lot for thinking through
0:51:07 what the legacy of this awakening might be
0:51:09 and what the next one might look like.
0:51:11 One thing that I think is importantly different
0:51:15 that has been increasingly different each awakening
0:51:16 is that the share of Americans
0:51:19 who take part in the symbolic professions has changed.
0:51:23 So in the 1920s, at the time of the first great awakening,
0:51:25 symbolic capitalists were like 3% of workers.
0:51:29 And now it’s about a third of workers.
0:51:33 And so still a minority, not close to a majority,
0:51:36 but a really big minority.
0:51:36 And that matters.
0:51:40 That matters because when you’re only 3% of a population,
0:51:42 you can’t just write off the rest of America.
0:51:45 If you’re a third of all workers though,
0:51:47 and you tend to be the most affluent workers
0:51:50 and you’re concentrated in these very particular communities
0:51:52 and you’re taking part in these really interconnected
0:51:55 institutions like academia and the nonprofit sphere
0:51:57 and policy-making circles and so on,
0:52:01 then it actually is, you absolutely can.
0:52:03 So you can just totally write off the values
0:52:06 of most of America and make money hand over fist.
0:52:10 You can be a political party that increasingly alienates
0:52:14 or is increasingly distant from mainstream America.
0:52:19 And you can win lots of elections of national city elections,
0:52:22 state elections all across the country,
0:52:25 be flush with funds and even be competitive
0:52:28 on the national stage if you can just get enough normies
0:52:29 to kind of get along with you
0:52:32 in addition to your kind of core constituency.
0:52:38 And so one of the things that’s become increasingly the case
0:52:40 that’s been different from awokening to awokening
0:52:44 is that symbolic capitalists have been a larger share
0:52:48 of the overall workforce
0:52:51 and more resources have been consolidated in our hands.
0:52:52 And as a result of that,
0:52:57 we have a lot more autonomy from the rest of the public
0:52:59 in a way that is sometimes pernicious.
0:53:00 And more broadly,
0:53:05 I just think that some of the current bifurcation we see
0:53:08 between us and most of the rest of society
0:53:10 is probably not sustainable.
0:53:14 I think one of the things that you see very clearly
0:53:18 is that growing shares of Americans feel like
0:53:21 they don’t have a voice or a stake in our institutions.
0:53:23 They think that their values are not represented
0:53:24 in our institutions.
0:53:26 And in fact, they think that our institutions
0:53:29 are hostile towards their interests.
0:53:32 And there’s lots of research in the United States
0:53:33 and around the world that suggests
0:53:36 that when people feel that way,
0:53:39 what they do is they try to burn down those institutions.
0:53:42 They try to marginalize them, defund them,
0:53:46 delegitimize them and otherwise burn them down.
0:53:48 And that’s a very rational response.
0:53:50 And it doesn’t matter what the institution is.
0:53:52 If you don’t have a voice or a stake in it
0:53:54 and you think it’s committed to the destruction
0:53:57 of people like you, why would you not resist it?
0:54:01 It would be crazy to actually conspire with that institution
0:54:04 towards your own destruction and immiseration, right?
0:54:05 You would of course resist it.
0:54:07 That’s the natural normal thing to do.
0:54:09 And it doesn’t matter what that institution is.
0:54:11 So often symbolic capitalists,
0:54:14 when we’re met with distrust,
0:54:16 when we’re met with this kind of resistance,
0:54:21 we pathologize it as like for instance, anti-intellectualism.
0:54:26 And instead of really reckoning in a serious way
0:54:29 with the fact that a lot of people feel not wrongly
0:54:32 in many cases, that they don’t have a voice or a stake,
0:54:34 that people like us look down on people like them,
0:54:36 that people like us are actively hostile
0:54:39 towards people like them, that we write off their suffering.
0:54:41 And we actually hope in many cases
0:54:43 that their suffering continues or grows worse
0:54:45 because they think the wrong things
0:54:47 or say the wrong things or vote for the wrong people
0:54:48 and so on.
0:54:51 And so I think this kind of,
0:54:55 this bifurcation is not sustainable in the longterm.
0:54:57 Something’s gonna give one way or another.
0:55:01 And I hope that it gives in a,
0:55:05 I hope that we can make choices
0:55:07 that allow something to give
0:55:10 in a way that’s not highly destructive.
0:55:13 – I do wanna say that I think this book is as,
0:55:17 intellectually honest as a book on this topic
0:55:18 could possibly be.
0:55:23 And for that reason, I think it’s a genuinely worthwhile
0:55:26 contribution to this conversation.
0:55:28 So I commend you for that.
0:55:29 – Thank you so much.
0:55:30 Thank you.
0:55:33 – Once again, the book is called “We Have Never Been Woke,
0:55:37 “The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.”
0:55:38 Musa Algarbi.
0:55:39 Thank you.
0:55:40 – It’s been great.
0:55:41 Thank you for having me.
0:55:44 (upbeat music)
0:55:55 – All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
0:55:57 I most certainly did.
0:55:59 As always, we do wanna know what you think.
0:56:03 So drop us a line at the gray area at box.com
0:56:05 and please go ahead, rate, review
0:56:07 and subscribe to the podcast.
0:56:09 That stuff really helps us grow.
0:56:12 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
0:56:13 and Travis Larchuck.
0:56:16 Today’s episode was engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:56:20 fact-checked by Anouk Dussot, edited by Jorge Just
0:56:23 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:56:29 New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays,
0:56:30 listen and subscribe.
0:56:36 This show is part of Vox.
0:56:38 Support Vox’s journalism by joining
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0:56:43 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
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0:57:06 All the subjects were what the students learned in class.
0:57:09 Geography is hard, but despite what you saw on that show,
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0:58:03 – Robinhood is introducing forecast contracts.
0:58:05 So you can trade the presidential election.
0:58:06 Through Robinhood,
0:58:09 you can now trade financial derivatives contracts
0:58:11 on who will win the US presidential election,
0:58:13 Harris or Trump,
0:58:14 and watch as contract prices
0:58:17 react to real-time market sentiment.
0:58:21 Each contract you own will pay $1 on January 8th, 2025,
0:58:23 if that candidate is confirmed
0:58:25 as the next US president by Congress.
0:58:28 Learn more about the presidential election contracts
0:58:33 on Robinhood at www.robinhood.com/election.
0:58:35 The risk of loss and trading commodity interests
0:58:36 can be substantial.
0:58:37 You should therefore carefully consider
0:58:39 whether such trading is suitable for you
0:58:41 in light of your financial condition.
0:58:44 Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply.
0:58:46 Commodity interest trading is not appropriate for everyone.
0:58:49 Displayed prices are based on real-time market sentiment.
0:58:52 This event contract is offered by Robinhood derivatives,
0:58:55 a registered Futures Commission merchant and SWAP firm.
0:58:57 Exchange and regulatory fees apply.
0:59:01 Learn more at www.robinhood.com/election.
0:59:04 (upbeat music)