News Brief: Elite Media, Dems Blame ‘Woke’, ‘Headwinds’ — Everyone But Themselves — for Trump Win
Citations Needed | November 13, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support from Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed, and today, Adam, we are going to discuss the media’s post-mortem Wednesday-morning quarterbacking of the presidential election that on November 5, 2024 saw the reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. And perhaps expectedly, although frustratingly, we have seen the media in their post-mortem analysis of what went wrong with the Kamala Harris campaign and why we are here as a country, have done everything to offset the blame from, say, themselves or the consultancy class that runs the Democratic Party, national campaign, certainly national campaigns, in addition to statewide races, but certainly at the federal level, everyone is blamed, except for, say, the people in charge of the campaigns, or the candidate herself, or the administration that she is a part of. And instead, there is an analysis of, if I can do a little bit of Kurt Angle here, the three ‘I’s: inflation, immigration and identity, and we can get into some of those and how they show up.
Adam: Yeah.
Nima: But also, we are seeing so much blame on quote-unquote “progressive policies” and certainly the Left as being the reason why the Harris campaign suffered this historic loss against a historically bad opponent, someone who we have already had experience with at the presidential level, and know is a absolute national nightmare. And yet, this campaign, this Harris campaign, lost in bloodbath fashion. And so what we are seeing from the analysis post-election, Adam, is yet again, the same finger-pointing away from their own culpability by the political class and the media.
Adam: Yeah, in many ways, it is a replay of 2016 where our politicians cannot fail. They can only be failed by us, the voters. But the name of the game is to offset blame. This is crisis PR management 101. You’ve been found with a dead body in your home, and you need to get off. You need to get off on manslaughter, which is to say incompetence or factors outside of your control. Which makes sense, because again, if I raised $1.8 billion and failed to do the single thing I was tasked with doing, which is defeating Trump, again, historically unpopular candidate who has unfavorables higher than gonorrhea, I too, would be looking for scapegoats that weren’t me, because, again, there is a permanent class that runs the party of highly-paid consultants, big corporate donors, or rather, big billionaire donors, and the corporate consultant milieu they operate in, and they have certain ideological, narrow parameters that they operate in, broadly seen as what we call the kind of Reagan-Clinton neoliberal order.
This is obviously a generalization, but it’s generally true that is who runs the party. This is the milieu they operate in. The Super PAC campaign. Messaging was run by Anita Dunn, with pulling from David Shor. Anita Dunn, for example, counts among her clients, Walmart, L’Oreal. She runs a public relations firm. When Ronan Farrow reached out to Harvey Weinstein for comment in 2017 after he was about to drop his exposé, the first person he called was Anita Dunn. That’s what she does. She does crisis management, to be clear, she wasn’t paid by Weinstein, she claims, and then she canned him the second the story actually dropped and the details emerged. But this is what she does. She does crisis PR.
And these are not people with deep ties to progressive causes, to labor, to environmentalism, to anti-racist work, whatever. Right? These are people who operate within the corporate world, and when they shit the bed and piss away $1.8 billion, they’re not going to go back to some youth advocacy center in Baltimore or go back to a union hall. They’re going back to Volvo and McDonald’s. So they need to kind of protect their brand, because obviously this isn’t great for optics, and so they’re running a similar playbook to that of what Hillary Clinton’s people did. Because again, it cannot be their fault. It has to be things outside of their control.
And there are three emerging scapegoats. Our number one, of course, the go-to, very popular in 2016, some vague moving target of wokeness. The Democratic brand is seen as too woke, too fussy, too pronoun-obsessed, right? This kind of unfalsifiable trope. Number two, economic headwinds, which is the idea that there was an anti-incumbency bias, which is not really true. We’ll get to why later. And number three, the voters themselves. This one has the benefit, instead of seeming overtly racist and transphobic like number one, this one has the benefit of seeming like one is actually super hip and jaded and kind of looks longingly into the distance and says America is just broken, that there’s just too many voters who are just ontologically evil and racist and they can’t be moved. These three narratives all serve one function, which is they evade responsibility for those in charge. And as we’ve talked about, especially with Gaza, is that there was an entire media apparatus, MSNBC, New York Times, who, again, launders all these narratives from the candidates themselves, with anonymous sources and aides, who, of course, are sniping at each other and covering their own asses and their own careers. There is a narrative of what we call Feigned Helplessness. Biden can’t stop Israel. They don’t know what’s going on. What’s what? ‘I’m an intern.’ ‘I just got here.’ ‘The campaign, you know, we tried our hardest, but it didn’t really work.’ So this Feigned Helplessness is going to be part of that narrative. So let’s start with the first one, which is, I think, the one that was most popular.
Nima: Yeah, so let’s start with this idea of anti-wokeness as being the scapegoat for why the Harris campaign suffered this historic loss across the country, you know, losing vote share, I think in, like, every county compared to four years ago. If I can Kornacki this for a second. But this attack, slash, you know, finger-pointing, is summed up very well by columnist Michael Hirsh for Foreign Policy in his November 6, the day after the election, analysis in Foreign Policy entitled “Why She Lost,” and he wrote this, assigning this blame to the Harris campaign. He said it was because of the quote, “takeover of the Democratic Party by progressive, so-called woke issues,” which was, quote, “devastating to Harris’s campaign, especially as Trump and the Republicans successfully painted her as an unreconstructed left-winger.” End quote.
Adam: Right. And this was echoed by typically, the issue was quote- unquote “trans issues.” So the idea is that trans they got hit with the trans stuff. So it’s clear that after 2016 trans people were also blamed for Clinton’s law. So this is a pretty standard playbook. In fact, everybody from Tony Blair to Michael Bloomberg to Mark Lilla to Frank Bruni to Bill Maher blamed quote-unquote “trans bathrooms” on Clinton’s loss. The idea is that these so-called cultural issues are too divisive. Now never mind that on the eve of the 2012 election, Biden said that trans rights were the civil rights issue of our time, and Obama won by 50 electoral votes. This is supposedly again, this kind of catchall bogeyman.
Matt Yglesias listed his reasons why he thinks they lost. Again, Matt Yglesias’s co-confederate David Shor, who’s part of the popularism crew, the kind of anti-woke messaging crew, he got the campaign he wanted. Harris never mentioned her identity. She doubled down on border and policing. She did the supply-side YIMBY rhetoric. She did everything Matt Yglesias wanted her to do.
Nima: That’s right. She ran a Republican campaign, but when there’s a Republican still on the ballot–
Adam: Doesn’t work as well. And then he, of course, still complains, saying that this was an issue of fussy language control and that biological sex was a matter of science and not something to be debated, and that the Democrats need to make that commitment to win in 2028.
Nima: Yes, and it wasn’t just Yglesias, of course, doing this. The New York Times editorial board chimed in similarly the day after the election again, November 6, 2024, diagnosing the Democratic Party’s biggest problem and looking for a way forward. The Times editorial board wrote this, quote,
The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election… It took too long to recognize that large swaths of Democrats’ progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system — which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults.
Adam: Right. So this is the ultimate go-to scapegoat, that even though Harris ran a centrist campaign, even though she made Liz Cheney the center of her campaign, did more events with her than anyone else, and had Mark Cuban as her primary surrogate, even though they explicitly ran a campaign to court Republicans, the fact is, they didn’t do it enough. So the response is true Liz Cheneyism has not been tried.
Nima: [Laughs] Right. You didn’t Liz Cheney this enough despite campaigning with her more than anyone else. Harris had at least four major campaign stops with Cheney, also did this with Mark Cuban, more than she showed up alongside strong supporters of her campaign, like Shawn Fain, the head of UAW, the United Auto Workers, which recently won a big union victory. That was not leaned into, no, it was rather the kind of old-school, neoconservative, We Can Be Republicans Too.
Adam: It’s MSNBC brain, completely down the middle. And this is something, by the way, that was reported on by Frank Foer at The Atlantic, Team Biden inner circle, the ones that didn’t go to work for Harris, are saying that she not only leaned into Biden’s economy, which was deeply unpopular, and did the voter scolding with respect to inflation, but focused entirely on January 6th stuff, and, you know, democracy on the ballot, that kind of like high-minded MSNBC stuff, which is fine, but it was completely untethered from any kind of economic populism. And in fact, Foer wrote, quote,
quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer…To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Unquote.
So to the extent to which there was anything populist, and look, let’s be obvious here, the argument that Nima and I would make would that the way you win voters is to offer them things, to materially improve their lives through left economic populism, through jobs programs, Medicare For All, free college, this is the key, it not only aligns with my ideology, but it’s actually a way you can win votes. That’s the kind of theory.
Nima: And which, Adam, we should point out, as we have but I want to do it again. These things poll really well. And I know we have problems with polls. I know we have problems with punditry. That’s kind of the point of our show. But we do know that these are deeply popular things, Medicare For All, wealth tax, a minimum wage. When these are on the ballot, isolated from candidates themselves, they win. You saw this almost everywhere this past election, with, say, abortion rights and codifying those into state law. That there are states that voted in favor of abortion rights but against the Harris campaign. This is a campaign, candidate, party problem, not a policy problem.
Adam: Well, it’s again, they this was a throw the bums out election, and they did absolutely nothing to distance themselves from Biden, which, according to NPR, Harris, quote-unquote, “people in Harris’s orbit” say was a mistake, because, again, the argument, people say, Oh, well, she can’t break from Biden because she’s his Vice President. That’s, again, with Gaza. That’s made up. That’s not a real thing. That’s just a norm.
Nima: You know that quote-unquote “norm” that is unassailable, like, maybe just don’t do that.
Adam: It’s just something you made up. And again, if we’re talking about the threat of ending American democracy, which is their rhetoric, right? Ascendant fascism. Certainly that’s more important than a fucking norm that isn’t a real thing, that isn’t a real constraint. There’s no federal agent that’s gonna come arrest her.
Nima: When the incumbent candidate has already been pushed aside rightly, because he wouldn’t be able to win, on his own policies, his own administrative track record. And so you know, yet we have columnist Matt Bai from the Washington Post diagnosing this the way that one would expect in his article, again from November 6, the day after the election, entitled “Where did Kamala Harris’s campaign go wrong?” and this was part of his diagnosis. Quote, “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics.” End quote.
Adam: Right. This is the exact same blame deflection we got from 2016. It’s almost verbatim. Mark Lilla wrote almost the exact same piece in The New York Times. And so next up in our blaming-the-wokes pantheon, again of which there are countless examples. I know we’re citing a lot of them, but there’s actually about ten times more, is Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough. So on his show, obviously, again this is a show most popular with supposedly the president, Vice President Kamala Harris is a frequent viewer, as was former Chief of Staff of Biden Ron Klain, now a lobbyist and consultant.
So this was them reading Maureen Dowd’s op-ed, so we really have our finger on the pulse of the working man here. We have Morning Joe and their cast of layabouts reading an op-ed by 74-year-old New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd complaining about Woke being a reason they lost. Again, these are a bunch of extremely rich people in New York media complaining about wokes being the reason that they and the party they led and the strategy they supported, the Liz Cheney strategy comes from Morning Joe basically. That it’s actually in fact pronouns and fussy academics. So let’s listen to a little clip from that.
[Begin clip]
Mika Brzezinski: The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctedness, condescension, and cancellation. And it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx” and “Black Indigenous People of Color.” This alienated half of the country or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help. When the woke police came at you, Rahm Emanuel told me, you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you. There were a lot of Democrats barking, people who don’t represent anybody, he said, and the leadership of the party was intimidated.
Donald Trump played to the irritation of many Americans disgusted at being regarded as insensitive for talking the way they’d always talked. At rallies, he referred to women as beautiful and then pretended to admonish himself, saying he’d get in trouble for using that word.
[End clip]
Adam: Other electeds, again, corporate-funded, centrist electeds who kind of barely won, also piled on. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts would tell the New York Times, quote, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Unquote.
And Tom Suozzi of New York told reporters, quote, “The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left. I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but” — oh, that’s never a good sign, to get the but.
Nima: [Laughs]
Adam: “But I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” Unquote. So here we have trans issues as being the reason they lost. Because, again, there’s no data showing this, none at all. It’s just vibes. And more importantly, like, trans people are such a small percentage of the population, there’s such an easy scapegoat, like, who’s gonna really come out and defend them, other than a handful of LGBTQ, you know, lobbying groups that are completely, sort of not really part of this discussion. So again, it’s as a scapegoat, it’s perfect.
Nima: Yeah, the anti-trans frenzy has been absolutely rampant in here. I mean, you just quoted. Adam, two congressmen from the liberal Northeast, right from Massachusetts, New York. On the ballot in New York this past Tuesday was Prop 1, which does actually address, a little obliquely, trans rights, and that passed overwhelmingly. So you have Tom Suozzi talking about, you know, ‘I don’t want to discriminate against anyone, but’ and doing the anti-trans move when voters overwhelmingly supported the proposition that was on the ballot that would more affirm trans rights and trans humanity, there is no reason to appeal to that as a reason why across the country, this was a losing strategy for the Democrats and a winning one for the Republicans.
Adam: Because when you’re not offering people to materially improve their life other than scolding them about job growth and a reduction in the rate of inflation, which is, again, not the most immediate form of help, this is all you have. You don’t have anything else because you’re not making any meaningful changes to the way the system works. And so when people talk about the economy, I think they often times conflate two things, which is the relative economy under Biden versus Trump, which again, is so muddied up by COVID It’s hard to keep track of, versus the steady state, inequality, super expensive housing, super expensive healthcare, that has gotten worse, and Democrats are supposed to help with that, and they simply don’t.
Nima: And so the fear rhetoric is going to be very, very powerful. And both parties leaned into fear rhetoric. It’s just that the Republicans were fearmongering based on, you know, whether it was the economy or immigration or trans rights or, quote-unquote “crime,” and the Harris campaign’s response to that was to fearmonger about the Trump campaign, not address those issues, dispel disinformation, and you know, outright lies about all of those issues, but rather try to reclaim the mantle of freedom, try to talk about the threat to democracy, which I think is real, but also it did not work.
Adam: Well, in February, they tried to outflank them on immigration from the right. And what did that end up doing? Nothing. It did absolutely nothing. It just, again, if I can choose between a real Republican and a Republican light, I’m just going to go with the real Republican, because there’s no real contrast. So look, they obviously didn’t really motivate people to get out, probably because they were chasing a phantom, which is a Liz Cheney, Never Trump Republican, which is like 45 people, half of whom work at MSNBC. These are not real constituents.
And again, then there’s a question, did they chase these votes because they had a genuine belief this is how they were going to win, or did they win, or did they chase these votes because this is just their ideology?
Nima: Right.
Adam: And I believe it’s pretty much just their ideology. I believe that they’re mostly conservative. They work in the corporate world. They watch fucking Morning Joe, you know, like Clockwork Orange every fucking day for eight hours a day. And this is just the ideological stew that they operate in.
Nima: Right. When you run on militarizing the border and then get exasperated when Trump sinks that as a political cult move, you are not making the argument for any kind of break from Republican policy or platforms, and you certainly are not doing anything that’s even remotely progressive, not even to mention continuing to support a genocide in Gaza. I mean, all of these add up to completely abdicating any kind of space for progressive or, I mean, let alone leftist policies. But then, of course, blaming those phantom policies and that phantom constituency which had no hand in guiding that campaign —
Adam: Which, again, if their campaign had listened to Citations Needed News Brief on this, they would have known that.
Nima: Exactly.
Adam: We said that.
Nima: [Laughs] That winds up being the culprit. And so, in turn, you get this kind of rhetoric from Philippe Reines, former Hillary Clinton adviser, on CNN’s morning show, where he says this:
[Begin clip]
Philippe Reines: But we need to take stock of why we are being held hostage to the far Left. No one should be and wants to be kowtowing to the extremes of their own parties. That just shouldn’t, it, to the extent that majority should rule, the majority of Democrats don’t agree with the things that we are being tagged with. How that works —
Kasie Hunt: Take us through a couple of those things.
Philippe Reines: I think Democrats believe in common-sense stuff more than you realize. I mean, it’s, it’s not like any of us sit at home and don’t talk to anyone. Most Democrats I know think there’s a huge problem at the border. Most Democrats I know think, frankly, that males at birth shouldn’t play in women’s sports and vice versa. Again, I’m afraid to say something wrong. But the woke stuff, the PC police stuff, you’ll see Republicans who say they’re afraid to say X, I’m afraid to say X. These congressmen are afraid to say X.
[End clip]
Adam: Yeah, this is someone who’s a private consultant, who goes in and out of the corporate world, who was a lobbyist for Beacon Global Strategies, which is basically a defense-industry lobbying group with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin as their clients. This Beacon Global Strategies also advises Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. So this is someone who is part of the very class that was responsible for them shitting the bed. He was an adviser to Harris. So again, what’s he gonna say? And then they always frame it as, like, tough talk, being real.
Nima: Right. ‘I don’t want to get in trouble for saying this, but we gotta, we gotta just be honest here, man.’
Adam: Yeah, Politico and CNN all phrase this as, like, ‘Democratic insider gets straight and has a tough message,’ and it’s like, you’re just scapegoating, fucking, a caricature of woke people and not pointing the finger at your fucking self who advised the campaign. So again, there may be people who are listening who think, Yeah, there’s some excesses of political correctness that I don’t like. Fine, but be very clear that when these people are citing this as the reason they lost, they are doing it for one reason and one reason only, which is to absolve themselves of responsibility. They’re going to ratchet up the racism machine, and they’re gonna say, Oh, well, the electorate, they’re just like me. Again, Bill Maher has been doing this schtick for years. ‘The average Joe is just racist.’ It’s like, well, it’s way more complicated than that. And again, if you don’t offer them anything, then these types of minutia become the center of the campaign, but you’re not offering them anything.
But again, this is someone who goes in and out of the corporate world, so that’s never going to be a solution. He’s not going to say, Look, we need a stronger populist economic message. We need to talk about unionization when you talk about a $20 minimum wage. The clients in his roster would absolutely have a meltdown if you pushed a $20 minimum wage or free healthcare or free college or free childcare. They’re not allowed to offer that as a solution, because this is the milieu they operate in. This is who goes in and out of these media spots at CNN and MSNBC. They will never, ever blame their world and their clique, and they have the strongest class solidarity on Earth.
Nima: And these rightwing messages are shared again and again and have been by so-called liberal and centrist media, Adam. So it’s not just the infection of rightwing talking points, it’s that these are then mainstreamed through outlets like the New York Times, which has gone on an anti-trans messaging campaign for months, if not years, where you have endless articles that talk about the border crisis or the flood of immigrants, and, you know, associate that with lack of support for a so-called, you know, American white middle class, or even working class. And you put all these together, you have this media approach that is scapegoating the exact communities, the exact policies as well, that then get blamed for these losses, and then they turn around and say, Oh, no, no. It was, it was the wokes. It was the campaign messaging. Always completely divorced from putting any kind of blame, any kind of focus back on themselves. And so we see this obviously, not just in the anti-wokeness finger-pointing, Adam, but when it comes to the economy.
Adam: Yeah. So there was a trope that emerged prior to the election that was originally peppered by Matt Yglesias. The general idea is that there were so-called, quote-unquote, “economic headwinds,” which made Harris, basically her winning impossible. The idea is that there was an anti-incumbent storm, a kind of hurricane, a natural disaster, that plagued every Western leader in the world, and that Harris was kind of up against it. Now this is partly true, but is missing several points of key context, namely, that several countries didn’t lose as incumbents, leaders in Mexico, Spain, Taiwan, among others, won their reelection. So it’s not a rule by any means, but it kind of sounds superficially appealing.
Nima: France managed to stave off the win of a overtly fascist party.
Adam: Right. So that’s just not really true. And then there’s the other issue, which is the extent to which she is an incumbent, that was a choice made by the campaign when she hired his team and ran on his policies and refused to distance herself from him, which, again, like with Gaza, was not something anyone forced her to do. There’s no law that says she has to do that. She chose to do that largely because she agrees with him. This is the thing. They just have conservative politics, and they mostly kind of agree with Biden, and to the extent to which she doesn’t agree with him, she’s more corporate-friendly than he was. So this idea that, like she was forced by headwinds, and this was a focus of the post-election messaging from the campaign itself. So in statements from the Harris campaign, the Biden White House and Barack Obama, they all use the term, quote, “economic headwinds.” And the campaign said it was, quote, “largely out of [their] control.” Unquote.
Nima: It’s incredibly convenient, because you know, who can marshal the forces of the wind, Adam?
Adam: Right. Well, that’s the thing. And so economic headwinds as a kind of catchall excuse comes from the corporate world. In fact, the Los Angeles Times, back in March of this year, wrote an article called quote, “Why ‘economic headwinds’ are suddenly to blame for everything,” unquote.
Nima: Writer Sam Dean basically explains this trope. Writing, quote,
Headwinds have always blown around in business English, but the phrase economic headwinds serves a special purpose: a majestic waving of the hand, an abandon to the fates, an inkling of force majeure.
“It’s a useful term, because we can’t control the wind,” said Thomas C. Leonard, a historian of economics at Princeton University. “If you’re a corporation trying to sell unhappy outcomes to shareholders or regulators, it’s a way of saying it’s a tough environment, but more importantly it’s a tough environment beyond our control.”
End quote.
Adam: Right. So the idea is that it’s something that they really have no hand in. And again, this is something that sounds savvy. It kind of sounds superficially true, and it’s no doubt part true. But they’re not saying, Well, it’s like 10%. They’re saying it’s, like, 90%, that she was basically fucked from the beginning because of anti-incumbency bias. Just ignore the fact that she made a choice not to be an incumbent. That was a, that was a choice, like we’re supporting genocide in Gaza. That’s a fucking choice. Politicians have agency.
Nima: And this is a choice that was actually noted in the New York Times itself a couple weeks before the election. As Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas in FAIR have pointed out recently, an article with the headline “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated,”
end quote, was published by The New York Times on October 24 of this year. It said Harris, quote,
has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.
End quote.
So this comes from the New York Times itself, from reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green, before the election. Yet we still see the post-mortem, especially from folks like the New York Times editorial board, not acknowledging this and blaming these non-existent progressive policies on whether it’s the economy or immigration or identity, as being the real reason, not because the Harris campaign deliberately, explicitly, purposefully avoided having a progressive agenda.
Adam: The third and final scapegoat I want to discuss is what Matt Bruenig refers to as the racial whodunit, where you find these subset of voters, in this case, increasingly Latinos and white women, and you sort of say they didn’t show up, they had a moral failing if they didn’t cross some 50% threshold. And while this is true, as far as it goes, it doesn’t really go very far. It’s not a very meaningful analysis, because if you believe some fixed, meaningful percentage of the electorate is ontologically evil and racist, then what’s to be done about it?
And to be clear, there are in fact a set amount of, a fixed amount of ontologically evil and racist voters. That’s a thing that exists. It’s just not 50% of the country. So anyone who’s spent 10 minutes at a Trump rally or Trump event knows that there’s a percent of people who are just hardcore racist, who just like Trump’s racism and no amount of economic populism is ever going to win these people over, no matter what you do. This is a sort of feature and a fact of reality. But of course this doesn’t represent every Trump voter, as indicated by the fact that I don’t believe there are millions of Black and Latino white supremacists. Nor do I think the concept is very meaningful. So, again, there’s a percentage, let’s say, you know, 30, 35% of Americans, you’re never really gonna move no matter what you do. But it’s not a majority and it’s certainly not in the event of an election with high turnout going to be a plurality.
Nima: Mm-hmm.
Adam: And again, the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th were not yeoman farmers and struggling construction workers and people who work at IHOP. These were petty bourgeois, they were fairly wealthy, again, we know this from the dockets, from the arrest reports, that these were people who were upwardly mobile small business owners for the most part. So there’s a hardcore contingent obviously, but that’s not really what’s at play here, and this binary between racism vs. economic anxiety is a false binary. It’s of course both. The issue is you can really only change one of those and you can’t change the other.
And the reality is that even if you sort of believe this, the way that the solution will manifest in public, and it already has in pop discourse, is that politicians therefore need to pander to people’s transphobia, racism, and sexism. It’s not like the federal government was going to pay for a bunch of anti-racism seminars. They’re just going to tell you the winning strategy is to pander to people’s id.
And this is something that was popular on MSNBC. It’s kind of popular in a lot of pop discourse. When people talk about, I remember in 2016 this was extremely popular. ‘Well, the electorate is just rightwing.’ There’s kind of nothing that can be done about it. And again, if this is true, A) Why did you raise $1.8 billion on a campaign when you could have used for like, state legislators or or going to Arby’s? So it’s not clear what I’m supposed to do with that information. It’s a call for impotence. And the general idea is that, like, if you do offer people robust economic populism, it’s not that they’re gonna become better people or have some kind of moral awakening. It’s that they’ll still vote for you. And that’s all that matters. You don’t need people to be morally hygienic. You just need them to vote for you. And again, with Trump increasingly picking up the working class Latinos and Blacks, which he gained significantly in this election, this kind of, I think the racial whodunit framework is not very useful. It doesn’t really tell you anything. And again, to the extent to which it has any value, or it’s true, it literally only exists as a blame-deflecting mechanism. And that even raises the question then, again, why did they go after Never Trump Republicans who were overwhelmingly racist and white?
Nima: Right.
Adam: That’s what they sort of, rather than energizing and activating their base, they specifically courted white, these sort of middle-class, anti-Trump Republicans who are, again, 15 people, because that’s what–
Nima: The three people in the country who know and care who Liz Cheney is.
Adam: They’re just not overly racist, but they’re probably still racist. So I’m not sure what the point of that was. Ended up 95, 96% of Republicans ended up going for Trump anyway. So it completely was a big, big, big dud. And so those are kind of the three deflections. The point is that people in charge can’t be responsible. The corporate capture of the consulting class and corporate media, CNN, MSNBC, again, they all rotate out. They all go to the same parties. They all know each other. They all go in and out of Uber and Amazon and McDonald’s. We’ve talked about it on the show many times. The taboo, you’re not really supposed to mention that. Everyone’s a Democratic strategist, whatever that means. Again, they’re not allowed to call them a lobbyist. Naturally, they’re going to want to point the fingers at either abstractions like ontologically evil voters that can’t, really, you can’t, there’s no call to action. Again, it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do with that information. Or, again, very vague, pink-haired, woke college-kid caricatures that are unfalsifiable, because, again, there’s always going to be some quote-unquote “woke contingent.” So how do you, what does it mean to kind of purge that from your party? Again, the campaign did not run on any of that shit.
Nima: Right.
Adam: So I don’t know what they want them to do. They want them only to run white men, I guess, who speak in a certain way, but that obviously seems like a recipe for racial and gender discrimination. So again, all this becomes the conversation because we’re not talking about the fact that they are part of a failed, dying zombie project of trying to reconcile Silicon Valley and Wall Street with a politics of class discontent. So in the absence of a meaningful alternative, people are going to seek out the grim, dark, ideological worldview of a Trump. Again, we’ve been saying this for eight years. We’ll continue to say this. And you know what? Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe a Bernie Sanders-type person runs in 2028 and just completely gets smoked. But, like, we’ve already tried the other thing, so why not give it a fucking try? [Laughs] The other thing’s not working.
Nima: Exactly. Thank you all for continuing to listen, to share, to support the show as you do. I’m sure we will have a lot to discuss in the coming weeks, months, and years, Adam, ahead, but thank you all for listening to the show. You, of course, can follow it on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed. If you are able and are so inclined, and we hope you are, you can become a supporter of our work through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, but that will do it. We will be back soon with more full-length episodes of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for that, but until then, thanks again for listening. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, November 13, 2024.
