Factually! with Adam Conover - How Trump Will Transform America Forever with Jamelle Bouie

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

This week’s election was a decisive win for Donald Trump. While it was once reasonable to view this racist, sexist, plutocratic, transphobic, criminal as an outlier in American politics, it’s time to face the reality that he is American politics. In this special episode, Adam sits down with journalist Jamelle Bouie to discuss the sweeping changes a second Trump presidency will likely bring to the American political system—and how those changes will shape the rest of our lives.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Van Pelt. Find what peaks your imagination. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say.

Yeah, but that's all right. That's OK. I don't know anything. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thanks for joining me. I don't know anything Welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thanks for joining me. This is a special episode of the show that we're releasing outside of our normal release schedule because as I record this,

it is two days after the presidential election. And as you all already know, Donald Trump won resoundingly. He won the electoral vote and even though votes are coming in it looks almost certain that he will have won the popular vote as well. And that has scrambled a lot of the things we normally use to explain how Donald Trump could win. You can't blame third parties. You can't blame Russian interference. You can't say that if the Democrats had just done something a little bit differently, the results might have gone differently because Trump's win was simply that big. His previous win in 2016, that was a fluke.

This was victory. The American people voted for Donald Trump because the majority of them wanted him to be president. And, you know, considering the fact that he's been convicted of many crimes, there are many unsavory things about him, I don't need to list any of them. The fact that he was elected anyway, that is something genuinely new in American politics. And that means we are about to enter a brand new political universe.

So what exactly is that universe going to be? Well, to an extent we already know because he said what he's gonna do. He's gonna pack the courts with arch conservatives. He's gonna deregulate businesses. The rich will receive tax breaks and the poor will receive the cold hand of the free market. Trump ran on a platform, an explicit platform

of dismantling and transforming the federal government. And he surrounded himself with this comically ludicrous goon squad of people like Stephen Miller, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Elon Musk to help him do it. He has the Senate and he could very well have the House as well. In fact, it looks likely that he will.

And that has given him maybe not a mandate, but the supreme ability to transform America in exactly the ways he said he's going to. And you know, I'm still grappling with it, as many of us are, because what that means is that we now live in Trump's America. This racist, sex-abusing, plutocratic, transphobic narcissist used to be an aberration

in American politics, a virus that we were trying to hope the immune system would suppress. But now, Trump is American politics, a virus that we were trying to hope the immune system would suppress. But now Trump is American politics. He is the body politic itself. And the changes that he makes to this country are going to be with us for a long, long, long time. Such a long time, in fact, that when I thought about, what do I wanna do on this show

to address what is happening? What I wanted to do was to take a historical perspective, to look at the long arc of American history and see how Trump fits into it, to see how the changes that he is going to make compare to the last century of American progress. And so that's what we're gonna do on the show today.

We're so lucky because we have one of my very favorite working political writers today. His name is Jamell Bowie. He's a columnist for the New York Times. And he is one of the smartest and most historically literate political thinkers out there. The conversation that we had was so clarifying to me and gave me so much to think about

and really helped me start to begin to think about how we'll chart a path forward out of all of this, or at least to something new. Now, before we get to that conversation, I just wanna remind you that if you wanna support the show and conversations like this, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free.

And please come see me on the road. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Denver, Colorado, Austin, Texas, Batavia, Illinois, San Francisco, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. At a time like this, I think you might wanna laugh and I think it might be nice to be around other people. I certainly am looking forward to being around all of you. So please come hang out with me at these shows.

We're gonna have a blast. Adamconover.net is where you get those tickets. And now let's get to this conversation with again, one of the smartest political writers and one of the people I have frankly admire most who's writing about any of these topics today, Jamell Bowie. Jamell, thank you so much for being on the show.

It is my great pleasure. You're one of my favorite writers on politics. You have been for a long time. So you're the perfect person to have in this, you know, few days just after the election. Um, tell us like, what is your main reaction of how transformative, you know, this political event is going to be? I think this might end up being like the definitive political event of at least like this generation. I think it's really that significant for any number of reasons.

I mean, the simple fact of Donald Trump trying to overturn the last election and then winning, suffering no particular consequences for it, and then winning an election does just possibly irreparable damage to the rule of law in this country. But more than that, Trump, he explicitly ran on this sort of authoritarian program of personalist rule. He will impose tariffs and decide who gets to avoid them. He will deport millions of people almost by fiat. He will prosecute and punish his political enemies,

et cetera, et cetera. And he didn't just win, and this wasn't in 2016 where he won by technicality, essentially. This is a bare majority of the public said, all right, let's go for it, let's do it. And there are no such things as electoral mandates. The very notion of a mandate, I think it sort of like runs counter to what,

how the American system of government is supposed to be conceptualized. But it allows him, his popular vote victory allows him to claim a mandate and claim the right to pursue these things, pursue this program. And it's, even if, you know, it's just half of what he ended up saying, that's still incredibly destructive. And that's just through the executive branch.

Republicans also won the Senate. I think they're pretty likely to win the House. Yeah. And so they can pursue, you know, their program as well, which is a little bit distinct, but it will mean big cuts to existing social insurance programs. They will try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and I have no doubt they're going to succeed. They will try to pass some kind of what they call national minimum standard on abortion,

which will effectively be an abortion ban. In all of the state referendums that have been had protecting abortion rights will be essentially moot because of a little thing called the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which holds that state or rather federal law and federal law interpretation from the courts is the supreme law of the land. So it's the way I described it in the column before the election, but, but it kind of captures my thoughts on the stakes is that Americans have basically been living in the political order constructed by the New Deal and the Great Society for quite a long time. In this election now gives Republicans, conservatives, various stripes of reactionaries, a real chance to just roll that back

as far as possible. And I'm actually pretty confident that they're gonna succeed. Wow. So the components of the New Deal meaning, like what is- Right, right, right. What does that mean?

Yeah. That's a couple of things. The first is the existence of the federal administrative state and the federal social insurance state, right? So prior to the 1930s, there were not these kind of big federal bureaucracies because there weren't, there wasn't any kind of congressional mandate to manage,

for example, the nation's economy. There wasn't a big congressional mandate to deal with labor relations, to deal with all sorts of things that pop up in a modern economy. And so during the New Deal, part of what happened there is like the construction of a modern administrative state full of agencies, some independents, some not, that are tasked with interpreting laws Executing laws and managing things on behalf of the executive branch The EPA which is you know formed in 1907 early 70s is a good example of like an administrative agency the FDA all these things And this has been sort of like a like a bane of conservatives ever since because they view it And this has been sort of like a bane of conservatives ever since because they view it both for ideological reasons

and for practical ones. For ideological reasons, they view it as sort of like an overweening amount of power. Like the government shouldn't be able to do this. But also the people who fund right wingers, big corporate interests, do not like the fact that there is powerful government agencies that can tell them they can't do X, Y, or Z.

And so that's a very important part of the New Deal order. The social insurance state, social security, which is the foundation of it, but the notion that the federal government has some responsibility for protecting people from the viciditudes of capital and from market forces. This has expanded in the 60s with Medicare and Medicaid, all sorts of programs, SNAP, which is food stamps, what is now called Temporary Aid for Needy Families, which was previously, it was called welfare.

All these programs have their genesis in the New Deal or are expanded in the Great Society and are designed to kind of protect people from just raw market forces and conservatives have never liked that and relish the opportunity to unravel as much unravel it as much as possible. The other aspect of this, and this is maybe a little more esoteric, this is the very concrete stuff, is that kind of beginning really beginning with the after the Second World War but kind of really

taking shape in the 50s and the 60s, there is a transformation of the relationship of the federal government to the state governments. In the 19th century, the states had broad authority to regulate their internal affairs. Just called the state's police power. They could police public order, They could police public order, police public decency.

They could do all sorts of things to police how people behaved, acted, lived their lives. So for example, a state, states used to have laws in the books in the 19th century that said, if you come into the state and you don't have a job or you can't have title of property, you can only be here for x, y, or z amount of time because you would otherwise become some sort of public charge. We don't want you here. So if you can't prove these things after this amount of time, we're going to remove you. Segregation, Jim Crow segregation, sort of the legal basis for that is out of the state's police powers.

What happens in the middle of the 20th century? For a bunch of reasons, but a lot of them dealing with the necessity of a larger and more powerful national state is the courts begin to clamp down on that. So when you say, when the federal government says, states cannot discriminate on the basis of race, they are kind of taking away some of their police powers. Taking power from the states. Taking power from the states.

And the courts are affirming this. Again and again, the Warren Court is affirming across many different levels from how states organize their elections to again, social concerns, things like the right to privacy, all these things are impositions on the state's police powers and kind of shrinking them and weakening them.

One way to understand the conservative legal project is to reverse that, right? To sort of say, no, we're gonna re-empower states to do these things. When you say that states can now regulate abortion, that's what you're doing. There's a case right now in front of the court about whether or not states can ban gender-affirming care.

They're probably gonna say that if they can, again, and they won't articulate it in these ways, but it is again, is under this idea that we're gonna return these powers back to the states, give states broad authority to regulate their internal concerns. And that, I I think it's one thing for that to happen with the federal government Kind of resisting somewhat right which is the case in your democratic administrations It's very different when the federal government essentially on the side of that project and it's putting its weight

Not just putting its weight in favor for that project but also looking for ways to nationalize some of the things that states want to do so that that that democratic run states have no choice but to comply. This is, I think, one of the things that's going to distinguish this crop of conservatives from their predecessors, which no one, I mean, no one ever really has a genuine belief in, you know, states' rights, but these people certainly don't and are very opportunistic. So if they can use federal power to impose their preferred order, they're gonna do it.

Or if the only option or pathway is through the states, they'll do that. But they're gonna look for as many areas as possible to prevent democratic-run states from being an obstacle to the things that they want to do. Which is just to say that no one's really gonna be safe. California is the closest thing, if California has a- Gavin Newsom's already banging his drums saying he's gonna do,

that's what he loves to go to war with Republicans while I have plenty of problems with how he manages California, but that is his favorite thing to do. Right, and I have no doubt that Newsom, Moore-Raheely, is that her name, in Massachusetts, and various Democratic governors are gonna be doing the best they can to say we're not gonna comply,

and there'll be some avenues in which they can, because states still have like kind of broad powers there to some extent like co-sovereign but The federal government is going to try or the administration is going to try very hard to render that render that moot and so You know, I I don't like I'm not like a doomer or anything. I'm not,

that's not like by disposition or whatever. But I do think people should take very seriously that like these people mean what they say and they want to do the things they say they want to do. And those things are not just going to be ugly, but they may likely be uglier than I think anyone is anticipating, in part because of their incompetence, right? Like just because someone's bad at something doesn't mean they're not gonna try to do it. So just do it in a way that makes everything worse.

And because I think they're, I don't think any of them expected to be there. They're probably a bit drunk on power right now. Yeah. And that also leads to people behaving in kind of extreme ways. So I anticipate mass deportations and what that entails. I anticipate tariffs.

And then I anticipate this attempt to kind of really pursue this hard right ideological agenda that's been percolating for a while now. And now- It's a long time right wing dream is to do these things. I mean, the mass deportations, I've seen you argue before that, you know, this is gonna basically entail ethnic cleansing,

that it's like a, the system of camps that they'd have to set up would be so massive. But that is a, that's a horror if they do it on that scale. But it's like one moment in time that they will do it. You know, it'll, it's happening right now. The other stuff that you just described is like a fundamental change

in the entire American system of government. Like the New Deal was a change, what you described as a change in the way all of America conceived of the government period from the courts to the average person, like what their expectations were, what was legally possible. Um, and, uh, the same thing with the relationships between the state and the federal government. And so you're talking about that fundamental of a change in America, like the, the system of government, like we gotta rewrite fucking textbooks.

Right, right. I mean, normal people who aren't big nerds do not perceive the United States as having gone through like fundamental kind of, you know, changes in its political order, its constitutional order over time, but it does periodically. Yeah.

And I'm not saying that this is definitely gonna happen exactly how I'm describing it, but I'm very confident that the people who will be in this administration, the Republicans who will be in office, see this as an opportunity to kind of rewrite the political order. And although all of the old order will not be washed away,

that's never how it works, right? Like always contain a new one will be entering kind of a new world when it comes to people understanding of the responsibilities of the federal government relationship to the states the power to the states to act all of these things. It'll be it'll be i think like a harder in an ugly world. it'll be, I think, like a harder and uglier world. There'll be less support for people in need. There'll be less regulation of the economy, of the food we eat, the water we drink, like all these things. It'll be more vulnerable to basically private power and private action.

And the courts won't be the kind of recourse that they once were. Obviously there will be Democratic appointees still on federal courts who will have their lifetime appointments but the probably most of the appointees in the federal bench will be appointed by Republicans will be appointed by Trump honestly.. Um, um, uh, uh, most of the Supreme court justices very likely will be, have been appointed by Trump. Yeah. Um, they'll put a couple of 18 year olds in to replace Thomas and Alito.

And that's going to be what the legal order is going to look like, um, for the duration and it's not going to be a legal order where if you are a member of a vulnerable community Saying you know the state in which I live is Unlawfully doing something to me. You may not really find a sympathetic ear on the court Which I mean two ways to look at this one way is that this will be horrible The other way is that this will kind of be a return to what the courts had been prior to the middle of the 20th century, right?

Something like the Supreme Court. Everyone thinks the seminal Supreme Court ruling is Brown v. Board. That's the seminal kind of emblematic Supreme Court ruling. That's why it was brought up. That's all they really tell you about the Supreme Court. They tell you about the dolls and all of that, right? And you watch a little documentary about it in school.

And like, other than that, Supreme Court doesn't come up that much. They do Dred Scott before that. And then they do, that's what happened later. But here's the thing, Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, those are much more emblematic of the Supreme Court's role in American life. Lochner v. New York, the slaughterhouse cases, like cases that restrict

the scope of democracy, that restrict the scope of federal power. That's much more in keeping. Or in our modern era, Shelby County v. Holder, Trump v. US, one of the more recent ones, Lope Bright v. Raimondo, that's much more emblematic of how the court behaves in terms of its role than the rulings that make us feel warm in our tummies. So, yeah, it's like. Is the question of, is something that often, a reversal I often experience when something changes is to go, oh, I thought I was living under

like the main regime, like this was the main arc of history. Actually, I was living in the blip. Yes. And that the Supreme Court, the Warren court, right? Like that, those sort of central years of the 20th century, that was actually the blip where you had a activist Supreme Court saying, oh, we should make people's lives better or we should fight against injustice in some way

or whatever justification they had, I'm sure there were many. But like that was actually the blip. It was brief. We've been out of that period for a long time where we were in the last gasps of it with the decision legalizing gay marriage, et cetera. But now we're out and yeah, that was temporary and it's not coming back.

Right, now if you're a criminal defendant who thinks you've been mistreated, if you're a sexual minority who thinks that you've been mistreated for your racial minority who's like, you know, my right to vote's being, you know, being trampled upon, this is, this Supreme Court and the federal system broadly is not necessarily gonna be a friend.

Yeah. It's not necessarily gonna be a place where you get relief. And in fact, it's gonna be the kind of place where if you go to them, not only will they not give you relief, they may well just take your case and say, well, we're now gonna like tear apart the thing that you thought was gonna help in your in your in your in your in your case

Whether that's past precedent whether that's a current law. We're gonna just like dismantle that and establish this new status quo So yeah, I mean this is I Want to be clear? This won't be the end right like? Like nothing ever, nothing, history keeps moving. Yeah. Saying anything is the end is a cop out. Like there's never an end, yeah. And this stuff will exist within the realm of politics,

even still, right? Like there will be political reactions, there will be backlashes, all of this stuff is still the case. But I think that if you are a progressive, you know, losing this election probably sets you up to be operating from a real position of weakness for at least the next decade. And in terms of cleaning up the mess, that'll be the work of like, you know, I'm in my late 30s, that'll be the work of

the rest of my life. Yeah. And that's like in the best case scenario. In the best case scenario, in like 25 years, there'll be like some liberals on the Supreme Court again, and there'll be some liberals in the federal judiciary, and the courts will become a place where you can like, you know, you can do something.

But more than likely, when it comes to the federal state and the federal system, the conservatives have like, they'll have the run of things. And Trump, I mean, there are many reasons why I find this all depressing. One of them is that like Trump will go into history to a lot of people as a great man.

Of course. As someone to admire, as someone to emulate, as a consequential and important figure in American history. That sickens me, but that will be the case. Simply by being president. I mean, the same way that, you know, Elon will, right?

Even if Elon had nothing to do with the election. Well, you have that much money, you can, we're a couple miles away from, we're a couple miles away from, or a couple blocks away from a Carnegie library. You know what I mean? Andrew Carnegie built these libraries. People love Andrew Carnegie. He was a motherfucker, right?

But like, when you have that kind of status, you build your legend and he already would have had that. But Trump would have just from one term as president, that's what you get. You get to have a library and all that shit. But he's, you know, I mean, he won the election in a completely different way. Right, right, right.

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and please support our show and tell them we sent you because I genuinely love these pants and I need them to know. Say goodbye to pants that put up a fight because when comfort meets style, you found public rec. Let's talk about the election for itself for a second because I was reading you all the way up to it and you had a lot of analysis that was quite optimistic,

not quite optimistic, but it was, had a lot of analysis that was quite optimistic, not quite optimistic, but it was you, you, you were sort of making a case for why things could go the other way. And I'm not here to say that that was a many, many people had cases that were blown out of the water. What I'm curious about is what do you feel that you learned about America or about the American people based on the results? Right, right, right. So I'm gonna first talk about my approach

to covering the election. I think in my column, I spent much of the election season, not so much analyzing the campaigns, just sort of like, I don't like, I'm a strategist, but trying to write more about the stakes of the election, what this will mean. And while I had an optimistic view of the Harris campaign, I also never was of the opinion that sort of like, A, she was destined to win,

that B, this was just gonna be a walk in the park, right? Like I've never thought that, a lot of people had the perspective, how could this be so close? And my view is like, well, of course, this is gonna be close. I think when it comes to what I've learned about the American people,

the funny thing about that question is that about three in every 100 voters kinda switch sides basically. And it's like, taking a macro picture, this is still quite a close contest. So what can you learn from such a close contest? I don't know. I think we can say something that has been true,

which is that, you know, about 50% of the voting public, give or take basically a couple million, depending on the year, like Donald Trump. Yeah. They like him. Now, I'm not gonna say they like what he's selling. I think this is actually an important distinction because I think part of what, part of Trump's superpower,

if you wanna call it that, is a political figure. I mean, he clearly has. Yeah. He clearly is a genius at a couple of things. Right. And one of those is that he's a blank slate to people. Yeah. And his, the fact that he is,

like he doesn't make any sense a lot of the times, he's constantly bullshitting, he's constantly lying, he's not just saying things out the cuff. I think that what that says to people is that you can't take anything he says seriously. And that allows people to then pick and choose what they wanna believe about him. All right, there's all those stories

about the immigrant cab driver saying he's gonna be great for immigrants. Right. I've seen plenty of accounts like that, yeah. And so I don't know, you know, next year, you know, the deportations start, when they start, you know, they cut Medicaid, when they do all these things, I think a lot of people who voted for them

were gonna be like, hey, didn't realize that was gonna happen. I think, or, I mean, when I get really depressed from what I'll say is I think a lot of people see that and treat it like it's the weather and not like to make any kind of connection between their vote and the outcome. And a lot of people won't notice those things happening

because they don't follow things that closely. They might eventually go, oh, my life got worse. Oh, I don't have Medicaid anymore. But they might not even make the connection. And the story that they probably will have in their head is, oh, that's just the government, right? They're not gonna connect it to Trump. But I'm not sure people are voting, right,

for a couple million people to be kicked off the Medicaid rolls, even though that's a very likely outcome of putting him in the office. But they like him, they like his image, his appearance, and they think that that's, you know, that is what a president is. And what to do with that? I don't know. I mean, I'm not, listen, put it this way. I'm a black guy from the South whose family was there throughout Jim Crow, right? Like I'm not, like by way of background, by way of experience, like I've never had some sort of,

I've never had some sort of, you know, rosy picture of the American people. And yet, it is rough to know that like, okay, this is just what people want. Yeah. And it's rough to think that culturally, one likely outcome of all of this is gonna be, we're gonna have just a lot more explicit bigotry in our cultural life. Yeah. In a way that I would have never been able to imagine as a 22 year old.

Well, when Tony Hinchcliffe's joke about Puerto, if you wanna call it a joke, about Puerto Rico at the Trump rally, that made such news that people were saying, this is an October surprise, this is gonna make such a big difference. And to see that not make a difference really clearly, a lot of people are gonna take notes from that.

Oh, okay, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No, you can say whatever. I mean, I'm frank. And by the way, I don't say that in terms of comedy, because say whatever the fuck you want in terms of comedy, but at a political rally. That was his fuck up, was that he said it

at a political rally, so the rules of comedy didn't apply, but also the rules of politics apparently didn't apply. I'm honestly waiting. Someone's gonna drop an in-bomb at some point publicly. And I think it's just gonna be like, oh, you know. And that'll just like open the floodgates. It would be like, at that point Trump will truly become a hero.

It's like Trump gave us the in-word back. Trump, Trump, you know. All we wanted all this time was just to be able to say it. I mean, he could just go up on a mic and say it right now. Like who's gonna fucking do shit about it, right? Yep, yep. Yeah, and so when I was looking at the electoral map, what it put me in mind of was the way I've heard people

describe what it was like to be a Democrat in the Reagan era. And I was alive at that time, but I was a baby. I was young as were you. But the sense of like, oh shit, I am very much a minority, not necessarily numerically, but culturally and politically for like a long time, that like nobody gives a shit

about any of my priorities at all. And I think that's very different from the feeling of like the Bush years when you had this very healthy, I don't know, liberal government in exile of like John Stewart and Ira Glass and the New York Times and like the sort of comforting bubble of, we'll get back there soon and we'll like fix stuff. I feel like this is a different feeling

of there being a regime change in some way. Yeah, I feel like it's somewhere in between because with Reagan, right, like in 1984, the day after that election, if you are a liberal, you're looking at this map and it's all red. There's just Minnesota. The entire thing is red. The entire thing is red.

Like, no exaggeration, the entire thing is red the entire thing is red like this no no exit ration the entire thing is red This is one of the most decisive defeats of a candidate Walter Mondale in American history you got like two in the 20th century. That's Reagan 84 and Johnson 64 You know, maybe you can say Nixon in 72 with McGovern, but even McGovern won like DC, you know, like McGovern wasn't, he was wiped out, but it wasn't as decisive in the same way as Mondale. And then you could be like, yeah, this is just, you know, the liberalism is on its way

out. And that's, you know, we get Bill Clinton, right? Like eight years later, we get sort of a much more conservative democratic party emerges out of all of this. This, and then with Bush, because he comes into office in these very contested circumstances, when the country seems really split in two, you do have this sense of like,

oh, this guy's an illegitimate president. And even after 9-11 and the overwhelming kind of like, you know, overbearing, jingoistic patriotism, like the America lover, leave it, all that kind of stuff, even then there is a sense of like real, at least from like a large portion of the country, real cultural pushback on that. This moment,

Push back on that this moment It feels Because it's relatively close Right like Trump will probably get somewhere between 50 and a half and 51 and a half percent of the vote It's relatively close Couple swing states a couple hundred thousand votes. It's a different story. So it's relatively close election to me doesn't feel like overwhelming cultural dominance

But it does feel You're a bit inexplicable sort of like oh people really went for this and to me I guess a lot of people have been making analogies to that after the oh for election and that feels about right sort of going into oh for you're just like How could George be was possibly win reelection the guy? He's a terrible president. We have this you have this war that's clearly a disaster How could people really go for this and then he wins a majority, right? He eats it out and then it feels like that the country is on his side And it feels a bit like that, but that's a fragile thing.

The kind of, this kind of victory is a fragile thing and there's, there's every reason to think that when this new administration really does pursue their most ideological aims, that there's gonna be pushback. Because I do think that people think that they're, what they voted for was, you know, 20% lower grocery prices and like low interest rates on mortgages. I don't think they necessarily thought they were voting for,

you know, letting Stephen Miller do a little ethnic cleansing as a treat. But they did, you know But they did vote for it. And I've had people say, so you've written, and you've said to us just now, this is what people want. You know, like it's democracy, you gotta listen to what people want.

And you're sort of saying it in a negative way, but I have talked to, you know, Hollywood liberals who I know in the industry, and they're actually a little bit more like, you know what, maybe this is what people want, and I can hear the acquiescence. I can hear the, well, if that's what people want, why shouldn't we do that?

I mean, I would agree with that. Democracy means what the people get, they get and they get it good and hard, right? So I think people voted for this and he told them what they was gonna do. And so I go ahead and do it. But I do think that, and this is a general trend, it's called a thermostatic reaction.

When an administration begins to pursue ideological goals, even the parts of the public that voted for that administration say, well, wait a second, I don't know about that. And if that, I will be surprised if that does not happen. If that does, I feel like if that doesn't happen, that's when I'll really begin to like fundamentally rethink what's going on here.

But something that, a change from the last Trump election is that immediately after the election, there were marches that was organizing and there was like cultural pushback. Like the, again, just talking about Hollywood, my industry, the push for more inclusion in the industry, it really picked up steam after the George Floyd moment, obviously, but it was happening before that.

There was an upswing and it wasn't just the Obama era either, it was like, it was a reaction to Trump of like, hold on a second, racism is afoot and you know, let's make sure we do something about it. And all the other things, because he was seen as this sort of virus that we have to take a white blood cell approach to. And that is not the case this time.

I don't think there's gonna be any of it. I hesitated about saying this publicly and I guess I'll just say no. I think the kind of resistancing that we saw is not gonna happen. For the simple reason that I do think the popular will win, I think people are just, I think they are resigned to it. Like no one wants to exert that kind of energy. And when I say that there'll be a backlash,

I don't think there'll be like big marches in the streets, but I think this stuff will be unpopular. Like, you know. And I'm picturing, be unpopular. Like, you know. And I'm picturing, I'm picturing though, like he does have some popular, there'll be protests. The protests will be slandered as Antifa. He'll send in the military as he said he wanted to do,

as he said he will do. And then at that point, you know, half of the country will say, oh good, those people are getting shot. As they did, you know, in Kent State or whatever. And as, you know, as they did when Rittenhouse shot a bunch of people, but it won't be a couple of vigilantes. It like, that's, yeah.

Yeah. That's a difference from last cycle. Yeah. I guess we'll have to see if, you know, if the mass deportations happen and we're getting like, you know, Elliot and Gonzales style photos of grandmas being like, you're running the trucks. Like how will people respond to that? Maybe people become so far gone and cruel and kind of as

long as I get mine that they won't care. In which case, in which case it's sort of like, well, what can you do? You know? I mean, that's that that's kind of where I am. And sort of, if, if, if that many Americans are at this point where they look at just wanting cruelty and they say, who cares, then I will do everything I can to help, help people out to speak truth to power. I hate that phrase. Um, uh, but yeah, you know, that's, I guess that's where the American people are.

And that's, and that's critically where a lot of American people have been in the past. Like, this isn't outside of the American character. A book I really love is by the historian Jefferson Coway called The Great Exception. And part of the argument, or the argument of the book is that the You know the era from like 19 from like basically the 1930s Into You know the late 20th century is like this exceptional period in American history In that if you take a longer view, you know the US in the 1910s and 1920s like a

deep inequality, you know, wanton public racism, isolationist attitude, that's much more typical of the American experience than a kind of cosmopolitan, kind of egalitarian, international perspective of the US after the Second World War. And I think that's right. And so if this era augurs a kind of return to public cruelty of that kind, then that'll just be that that is what the American character is. And it'll be the task of people like myself to just sort of like, you know, remind everyone that like, we don't have to be this way.

Like we, there is other options, other examples we have of being different. But doing that, laboring under the expectation that like, you know, that'll be, that'll be, that'll be dead in the ground before the pendulum really, really swings back. Which is the position that like many, many people have, like, that'll be dead in the ground before the pendulum really swings back. Which is the position that like many activists or people pushing the, I mean, look at abolitionists, right? Who spent generations without seeing any progress.

And it's like cold comfort to be like, oh, you could be like an abolitionist in 17 whatever, right? And like, oh, it'll happen happen a couple hundred years from now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. But I think that's the reality. Not even abolitionists, if you're just like, if you're a Philip Randolph in the 1930s, you're a labor leader and a civil rights leader,

and he managed to see the illegal end of Jim Crow, but it was the very end of his life. Yeah. He saw it happen, and then he died. Or one of my favorite people in his life. Yeah. Right, he got, he saw it happen and then he died. Or one of my favorite people in US history, W.E.B. Du Bois, the great sociologist and, you know, political thinker. He was born in 1868. The book that everyone reads in college from his,

The Souls of Black Folk, he wrote in 1900, that's when it was published. So he was like a man in his early 30s. And then he lived for 63 more years. And so he died in his 90s and he died in 1963. Like he did not live to see the Civil Rights Act. Wow. So I've said before this election, I used to say this a lot, and I said it, and I would always say

it and say, well, hopefully we don't have to experience that, but I think now I have to say it and say it, hey, we probably will experience this. There's no iron law of history that says things get better after four years. Wait, there is a guy who used to say, the moral arc of history, I used to hear that phrase quite a lot a couple years ago, the moral arc of history bends towards justice. I heard that maybe once or twice a day, I would hear that phrase.

Everyone forgets the second part of that though, whereas we're King is saying, as long as we work towards it, we have to take an active role in doing this, it's not a passive thing. And even if it's true, like even the more arc and universe does bend towards justice There's no iron law of history that says you have to be alive to see it. Uh-huh. It could just be You do your you do your little part and pushing it. Yeah, maybe at some point in the future

It bends a bit but not to sound too bleak but like most of human history is a catalog of misery. Yeah. And I often feel angry at my American civic education because I was raised being told, you know, being told about Brown versus Borden, all that, you know, and hey, this is what happens. We just, we'll just wait a little bit and it'll happen. You know, the hidden figures version of,

well, eventually, there's racist signs for the bathroom. We gotta take those down. Oh, okay, we fixed it. You know, geez, progress happens. And it did happen throughout my lifetime, you know, gay marriage and legal weed. Oh, wow, okay. Stuff I didn't think was possible when I was 18

and it happened. But again, that's like a story that I was told by the Boomers about themselves, basically. They also said that they stopped the Vietnam War by smoking weed at Woodstock, you know? And it wasn't fucking true. And I had to read Rick Perlstein's book, Nixonland, to like learn,

oh, wait, there was the number of failures that were actually happened, and the amount of resistance and the fact that that was a minority view, et cetera. Maybe we're about to all get like a really rough lesson in the reality. Right, we're gonna get a rough lesson in the fact that elections matter, who controls the reigns of government

really does matter, I know it doesn't feel like it sometimes, but it matters. And the history just doesn't stop. Now, the history doesn't stop thing applies to everyone. And if I were talking to a bunch of Republicans, I would remind them of this as well. What is will not always be. You're celebrating a victory now, congratulations. But your opponents are not just going gonna roll over and stop.

And assuming that we have mostly free and fair elections in this country going forward, you are gonna have to be on defense somewhat. And maybe this is a big realignment and you have this big new coalition that's gonna carry you through, or maybe you won't. I think one takeaway people should have from the past 15 years of American politics is that the electoral majority's people are someone that are very fragile and very short-lived.

And so, you know, the Obama coalition fractured in 2016, the Trump coalition fractured in 2020, the Biden coalition fractured in 2024, and there's no reason to think, the Trump coalition fractured in 2020, the Biden coalition fractured in 2024, and there's no reason to think that the Trump coalition won't fracture again, especially given what we know about Trump. I mean, this is the thing I also have to remind myself. These are not smart people. And in fact, a lot of the smart people have been purged

and the people who they brought in who think they're smart are maniacs. Yeah. And so maybe they can accomplish some things, but the thing about maniacs is that they also fuck up a lot. Yeah. Um, so. But look, I mean, I spent the last couple of years, you know, doing comedy about how stupid Trump and Elon Musk are.

Right. And at this point, I gotta say, I mean, they're smarter than me at something. You know, I mean, yeah. To be clear, I'm not saying that they aren't successful. I'm saying that they are still subject to the rules of reality. Yeah. And eventually bills have to be paid, chickens come home to roost, etc. etc. And so, you know, they're riding high now.

We'll just, we'll see. And even if they accomplish a bunch, there'll still be failures. And the failures will be opportunities and possibilities for pushing back and such. I want to ask, let's talk a little bit more about like the historical regimes in American politics because I've used the analysis plenty of my work about, you know, we had the New Deal regime, but the flip side of it for the analysis I've read has always been the Reagan era. That like Reagan was when that was undone. And you know, if we're trying to tell the simple

progressive story of American history, I've told versions of the story a million times. Good shit happened on the New Deal. We built something. Then the Reagan coalition came along, neoliberalism came along and destroyed it. And now we're living in the wreckage of it, you know? And we need to rebuild whatever that thing is.

We need to regulate the thing that we're talking about. We need to take that approach again. And so therefore I've always been waiting for what's the regime change that's the opposite direction from Reagan, right? And it's a simplistic way to look at the world that we're gonna go back and forth and back and forth, but it's kind of hard to avoid thinking that way.

Yeah. So in that you are thinking of Trump as being, I mean, maybe these mental models don't matter that much, but if you're thinking of Trump as being, this is the repudiation of the New Deal, do you then say, oh, the Reagan era, that's just the lead up and now we're really doing it, or are we getting a double regime in the same direction?

No, I've always understood the Reagan era as being very much a reaction to the 60s in the great society, right? So it's interesting to think about Reagan who always sold himself as a former Democrat as an FDR Democrat You sort of like saw the light, right? and that critique like part of part of the the Reagan conservative critique of Liberalism was essentially this. Under FDR, you had this broad-based universal liberalism that tried to help everyone with big programs. I mean, they're not opposed to that.

I mean, they actually are. We're not opposed to that, but we're opposed to the particularist, you know, well, I guess when you say these, these identity politics of the sixties, the handouts to the blacks and to the criminals and to the poor, we're going to roll that back until we're not necessarily going to touch, you know, social security. Um, we're not going to touch Medicare, which old people love. Um, but we're going to roll back civil rights enforcement. We're going to roll back a bunch of the regulatory stuff that comes at the sixties. We're going to roll back civil rights enforcement. We're going to roll back a bunch of the regulatory stuff that comes at the

sixties. We're going to roll back Johnson as much as possible. And you can think of, you know, the Reagan era as basically an attempt to kind of like, to pare back the extent as much as possible of state intervention that occurred in the 60s and to also impose a new paradigm for thinking about the government's relationship to the market and thinking about the government's relationship to the citizen that isn't a complete departure, but is very much a kind of like, we're going to do less and we're going to, what we'll do is we'll

facilitate you the individual citizen as a market participant and we're not going to have this big, you know, cradle to grave safety net will help you in some ways. You're not a victim, you're an entrepreneur. Right, right. And I would see, I would see, so that's, that's that. And like, that is to some extent, it's continuing through the Obama years. I think Biden imagined himself as like trying to push back

on it and trying to introduce and like, you know, returning to industrial policy and maybe the state taking more active role. And I think with Trump, I mean, the interesting thing, I mean, this is the thing about Trump not being particularly ideological. I think Trump and how many of his photos see him as is this sort of like, Patrick Familias, this like father figure who is protecting people from

outside threats and internal threats and so on and so forth. He's going to help them. He'll help them get rich. He'll help them get wealthy. But the ideologues that are actually coming in his wake do have like a very specific picture of what they want the country to be. And it's a repudiation. It's one part of it's a repudiation of kind of the entire post-New Deal notion of government as active participant in regulating the market and protecting people from market forces, which also dovetails with like social conservatives, right? Like if you, if you have to work in the market for income, there's going to be no protection from it. You're going to have to have people in the household to manage the household.

So we're going to force women back into the household as well. It's all, all works together in that way. And then you have this other group of ideologues who the part, the thing about the 60s, they want to roll back and that Reagan wasn't that interested in rolling back was the multiculturalism. Was rolling back the not just enforcement, aggressive enforcement of civil rights laws, but rolling back the idea that the government, the federal state has anything to say about how people are treated on the basis of immutable characteristics and rolling back the notion that the United States is a cosmopolitan society of any kind.

Reagan quite famously was like, yes, we people should come here. I mean, maybe this was the Hollywood guide in Reagan, whatever, but like Reagan, Reagan embraced the cosmopolitanism of the United States, but this group of ideologues does not. They see it as an imposition from outside and they want to roll it back as well. I'll say there's a certain irony in all of this, which is that the anti-cosmopolitan nationalists are in power because a bunch of Latino people voted more for Trump than ever before. Yeah. I find this just like a irony of history. Yeah.

What do you credit that shift to? If anything? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. That's for demographers and that's free. Those are people who are going to study this. I don't know. Who knows? I do't know. Um, who knows? I do think the people who study Latin American politics, mostly that Trump is like actually a very almost like a stock character of Latin American politics, sort of like the, the cardio figure, this sort of like man on horseback figuratively who, um, offers protection and the promise of prosperity is like a very familiar figure in the history of Latin American, Spanish American politics.

And maybe, I don't know, maybe for some newer voters in the United States, it's his familiarity that they're attracted to. Like he's very legible to them. I don't know Yeah, but That's just a side one of the ironic things about all this but the the the the the central point is that There you know from the 1930s to like the 1990s and into the Obama era, there was kind of a conception of American politics,

specifically from 65 to 2008. There was this notion of the United States as sort of like a multiracial kind of egalitarian democracy. And I think we're just like rolling back the clock that these things are not going to be guaranteed. Even the extent of American democracy could well be limited. The extent to which it can be limited, I think, is itself not the use of word again, a bit limited.

Like you can't, it actually would be pretty difficult to like end free and fair elections in this country for like concrete practical reasons and for cultural reasons. But, you know, even things like, there's nothing in the constitution that says, for example, that a district, two districts have to be of equal size, right? In terms of like state legislative districts. Like nothing that says explicitly,

this district, both districts have to have 10,000 people. And until the 1960s, there were plenty of places where, you know, one district would have like a thousand people and the other 100,000, and you're basically suppressing were plenty of places where, you know, one district would have like a thousand people and the other a hundred thousand, and you're basically suppressing the votes of that hundred thousand. And if the Supreme Court wants to go after those precedents that establish that, that establish like, you know,

one person, one vote, they can. And I kind of expect them to. Wow. How do you slot Obama into this narrative? I'm curious. Yeah, I don't know. I see Obama as, in the moment it felt like Obama was the beginning of something new,

I think as we look back. This is all contingent, of course, this wasn't inevitable, but at this stage, I think we can look and say Obama was the end of something, the end of one particular formation that could have, if things were maybe a little differently, could have broke through, but they didn't. And so, and it's noteworthy, right, that like, this is maybe like the second election where the Obama really tried to turn things and it just like, no one gave a shit.

It felt, it felt like somewhat kind of helpless. It was like up, he was up there pulling the same levers and pushing the same buttons. And he still has that sort of like halo around it. I mean, I've, I've worked with them. I've been in the room with him. It's like, yeah, he's like an incredibly charismatic and yeah. And he, and you see him and you're pulled back to 2008, right? But it's like the country is no longer in 2008.

And when I see him do that, and even his media project, I'm like, it feels out of step. And I was really struck by, I was watching Trump's victory party and listening to the commentary and just people saying, like, this is a movement. And I was watching it, it is clearly a movement. It's a movement that's been going on for a decade.

The fact that it's persisted over an interregnum is like makes it a more powerful movement that it has so much power now. And I look at Obama and I said, well, it felt like a movement at the beginning, but by the end, by 2012, he was not the leader of a movement. He was a regular old president,

but the way that he speaks and the way you can tell his aspirations were to lead a movement. That's what, I mean, he's, I can't imagine a more natural leader figure. He was a generational talent in American history. He just took over the entire Democratic Party. He, you know, he, whatever. It was stunning to witness. And it's the kind of thing. He, you know, he, he, whatever. It was, it was stunning to witness.

And it's the kind of thing, oh, it'll be another 80 years before there's another guy like that. And yet he, when you're looking at the last couple of decades, it's like, oh, that really was maybe a blip. What do you credit that to? Is it something about him or something? I think, I think it's, What do you credit that to? Is this something about him or something? I think, I think it's,

I think Trump in his three campaigns has clearly tapped not just into a resentment, but a desire to see certain kinds of identities affirmed. That people want whiteness affirmed, they want maleness affirmed, they want a kind of blue collar identity affirmed, they are tired of any kind of deference to people that they don't respect or they don't think belong. And Trump offers all of this and it's like it's like it's a powerful, it's a powerful thing.

And I think that's, you know, that it's, it's couple that with his own celebrity, couple that with his own kind of charisma. And it's a powerful thing It's it's a powerful thing the thing that I think a lot of these voters are getting isn't anything concrete it's like the psychic satisfaction of Just putting him there as like their guy Marking the country as theirs. Yeah. Uh, uh, and that, that is a powerful, that's a powerful pull.

Um, uh, it, it's, uh, it's sort of, it's, it's, you shouldn't, one shouldn't discount this and. Yeah. I mean, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there's probably certain, was for a certain way to combat it, but it required maybe activating different kinds of identities, telling it, telling a different kind of story. And I think Trump does tell a story that's compelling to people that kind of fits with the world that they live in.

And the story is basically in its simplest terms, some them has robbed you of your rightful place. And I will, I will, I will remove them, or I will dominate them on your behalf. Take vengeance on them. Right, whoever that them is, whether that them are immigrants, whether that them are, you know, it's Nancy Pelosi, like whoever the them is,

I will dominate on your behalf. And it's funny when you start to like look at kind of the cultural messages that just exist in the country, like that's actually kind of a dominant one that you, good hardworking, innocent person is being suppressed or disadvantaged by some shadowy or nefarious them. To take it a little bit away from the realm of electoral politics, I find, right,

when I've already talked about housing, like the housing crisis has a very straightforward explanation. We didn't build enough houses. That's pretty much, that's it. Spent 10 years, didn't build enough houses, and now houses are expensive because that's what happens when a lot of people want Something and there's not very much of it. Yeah, very easy

But you say this to people and they do not want to hear it. Yeah, what they want to hear is It's the hedge funds. It's Some them. Yeah, it's the people moving in it's the landlords. It's the there's always a them There's always a them. And when you say, yeah, yeah, they're bad, but they're not the cause, it's like, it's just like, no one wants to hear it. I mean, look at the comment sections of my videos on this

and in which we combat exactly that. I mean, I did a video with Jerusalem Desmos a couple of weeks ago and said, whatever. Landlords are a problem, but they wouldn't be such a problem if there were more houses and they wouldn't have so much of a stranglehold or they wouldn't be such a problem if there were more houses, and they wouldn't have so much of a stranglehold, or they wouldn't be able to gouge you that much. Like, private equity wouldn't be that,

it all comes back to the houses, and yet people just are like, no, no, no, it's this one bad person. Right, and I think when you begin to look everywhere, that is, there is no cultural story telling an alternative kind of framework for how we got to this world. All the stories are a them. Some them did it to you.

And is it really any surprise then that a political figure who is like, I will identify the them and I will destroy them for you. Any figure, any reason, any surprise that that guy has a wide audience. And it seems like maybe the only way you can push back against it is to identify maybe a less socially destructive them. But to my mind, you're still just sort of like reinforcing

this kind of narrative, which I think will always lend itself to like reactionary politics. Yeah, well, it's interesting because there is a them for, you know, progressives and the left sometimes, it's corporate power, it's billionaires, et cetera. And, you know, a critique I have of the Democrats this cycle is, look, housing is hard because you actually have

to point the finger at you, us, it's we, we did it together, we didn't wanna change our neighborhoods and we didn't build on that, et cetera. But I think the biggest mistake the Democrats made was people actually feel that they're suffering economically. Democrats did a lot of, why do people feel that way? And people have said, no, we are, I at the very least feel that I'm suffering.

I am suffering, I feel that I am. And that's a real thing to people, whether or not whatever the macroeconomics are, that's real. Trump said, you are suffering, it's because of them. The Democrats not only didn't have a them, they also didn't acknowledge the suffering. At the very least they would have said, oh no, actually, it's Elon Musk's fault.

It is Jeff Bezos' fault. It is capitalism's fault. Now that's not in Kamala Harris's, that's what Bernie would have said, right? And I think that's part of the lust among a lot of the left for Bernie is let's at least have a good story. And I would argue the story is probably largely true, but I don't know.

You raise a really good point about like the storytelling of it. We don't have the scripts. Yeah, yeah. And I think there are, because some of the problems, right? Okay, them is the billionaires. We're going to try to build universal health okay, them is the billionaires. We're gonna try to build universal healthcare to help combat the billionaires. But there's only so much we can tax the billionaires.

Like just on a purely like, you know, mechanical level. Like if we wanna have universal health insurance, we're gonna have to tax ourselves a little bit. And so where do we fit into this story? And an us versus them story does not prime one for we need to do things for each other. And there's no big cultural story that's about we need to do things for each other. We need to look out for each other. In addition to watching out for the them. Democrats don't have that story. Yeah. Democrats don't have that story. Not only Democrats don't have that story,

that story I think can only be built from the bottom up through institutions and structures that just like don't exist anymore, right? Like the last period, the last two periods of that kind of like solidaristic politics happened in the wake of labor unrest and mass unionization in the 20s and 30s. And then in the wake of the civil rights movement,

which is like a, like a, like a, basically a nationwide movement of like asking people to care about each other and to take each other's struggles as their own, which did shape how people understood what they should be asking for from their government. But we don't have that. We do have a left-wing populism that I think can be effective, but there needs to be another step. It can't just be, we're going after them. It has to also be, we do something for us as well.

What Trump has is those are them. And the most I can do is punish for them. And then you can fight it out for your own, I will make it so that you can fight it out for your own, you know, your own, I'll make it so that you can, you can prosper in this dog eat dog world, and I'll protect you from them as you try to do that. But a kind of, again, a message of solidarity, a story, a story that connects solidarity

to prosperity, to democracy, that's what we need, right? Those are the three things we need to connect together to democracy. That's what we need, right? Those are the three things we need to connect together for people. People to intuitively see that my prosperity not only depends on this thing we call democracy, this sort of like a nation of equals, but it also depends on seeing people who are not like me as someone like me.

And you can look everywhere in this culture and you will struggle to find any kind of cultural story around that. The cultural stories we have are, they are coming after you, you need to hustle. You have to save your soul, right? Like if you're evangelical, it's about your personal relationship with God. Um, uh, yeah. Well, you mentioned the, the labor movement and you said the word solidarity and solidarity is the word of the labor movement.

Having gone through the Hollywood strikes in 2023, I experienced it. And like, it is a powerful force, but it's, you know, just in these particular unions, it has been culturally inculcated over 50 years. And that's one of the things I think people liked about the story of the strikes was that solidarity, but it is vanishingly rare in like American society overall, especially the idea of,

I mean, what you're describing is people, American citizens having solidarity with undocumented immigrants. We are all part of the same human story. We're all trying to make a living and like imagine if that was you, man. Like that's really, it's a rare thing to find. And I guess you find it in some strains of Christianity,

at least that I was brought up in, having generosity towards the stranger and all that, but it's very atomized. Yeah, I don't think it's dominant by any means. And even, I mean, this is kind of a striking thing about this election, right? Like even among union members, it competes with other kinds of cultural narratives. Right.

And those other ones can be quite strong, right? Sort of like they are telling you that your maleness doesn't matter, that your maleness is toxic or whatever. And that's compelling to people, even if they're like in a union and they're like, you know, I Value my position as a man. I value Whatever social currency comes to that. I value whatever That the place I may have and some received hierarchy of gender and I want to protect that too And they're offering a story that helps me understand that and it gives me a chance to vote to protect it.

I don't want to simply say that all of this is because of stories and rhetoric and everything. I think all of this has like a material basis. Like people do feel insecure. They don't feel like they have enough money. And part of the thing these stories are doing is giving them a language for expressing these that sort of feeling of material insecurity. But I think it remains true that politics does rest on being able to give people a language

for articulating their anxieties. And there's not really like a dominant left-wing cultural message. I keep, because I'm a big history nerd, I keep thinking about the success of like the original iteration of the Republican Party, like the Republican Party that forms in 1854 as sort of this coalition of anti-slavery parties and nearly anti-democrat parties, but like anti-slavery parties specifically. specifically and part of the slogan in 1856 for the first time there's a Republican candidate run in a national election is I'm going to get the order wrong, but it's generally this is generally what it is. It's free labor, free speech, free soil, free men, free Mont,

the candidate being John C. Fremont. One of the, I think one of the great all time slogans in presidential politics, um, but the power of the slogan was that you had this big disparate coalition, but there's a story being told that the slave power is the reason why you can't get land to have a farm. The slave power is the reason why if if you wanna send a letter to your cousin in South Carolina complaining about slavery, they're not gonna mail it because they've taken over the postage.

The slave power is why you're competing, I mean, this is where it gets ugly, you're competing with black men in Northern factories. Why the slave power explains all of these things. And so vote for Fremont against the slave power. It was like a really powerful story and it really did help. It took all these material concerns and political concerns and gave people, you know,

a readily available way of articulating their frustrations and helped that Republican party like, kind of begin to sweep the power very rapidly. And obviously different circumstances and different everything. But the power of a coherent story cannot be understated. And Trump just, they have a story. And their story is you can't afford a house, it's because of the immigrants. You can't get the job you want, it's because of the immigrants. You can't get the job you want,

it's because of the immigrants. You can't, no one wants to fuck you, 19 year old man. It might be because of the immigrants as well. It's because of wokeism, which is a plot by the Democrats to multiculturalize America and steal elections Okay, ism isn't why is why the the big booty Latina the Latina won't have sex with you I spent too much time on tick-tock So

that that that is That is I feel I said that I think it's funny, but I think it's My my bosses are gonna somehow see this and be like, what's going on, what are you doing? Uh. I think you're fine, it's a complicated time. Emotions are running high. Yes, yes. No, the,

Trump has a story that he tells, and it's compelling to enough people. I think part of the task going forward, there's currently lots of recriminations and everything happening, and I think that. I think part of the task going forward, there's currently lots of recriminations and everything happening. And, um, uh, I find all that kind of a bit besides the point. It's like jockeying for influence. Uh, uh, I think the more important thing,

if you're serious about not just winning again, but like building a durable majority, is you have to, from the bottom up, figure out the kind of story that people, that like meet people where they are. Yeah. I think it's out there, but it's not something that's gonna be crafted

by operatives in offices. It's gonna be something that is discovered through a process of actually like rebuilding connections to people. Yeah. On a grassroots level. I have to say, I mean, normally I ask for a call to action for the audience, to me that's inspiring to me because what I do is I try to find these stories,

I try to tell stories in usually a very compressed way. I got my start doing these seven minute segments on television where I'd break down, here's the truth about this thing. Here's the myth, here's the fact. And got pretty good at finding, all right, you need a villain, you need a victim, you gotta do it this way, it's gotta be true.

The fact that that's something that we need, to me is like, ooh, that's something I would like to go try to find. What is the effective story in some way? I guess, you know, I don't wanna ask you to give the audience though, like any kind of, you know, what they should be doing right now, cause I think that's too much to ask.

So let's wrap up here in terms of your own work and you know, your time on this earth, how has what happened reorient just like how you spend your time, what you think is productive effort and how you think about the rest of your life? I'm still- That's right, it did end up kind of big.

Yeah. I apologize. Well, I mean, okay, like rest of my life, I'm like, you know, I feel like my first role in this life is like I'm a husband and a father. And so it's sort of like, rest of my life, I'm like, you know, I feel like my first role in this life is like, I'm a husband and a father. And so it's sort of like, I think, I was saying this to my wife actually last night, that like, one of the things, we're already doing this,

but like we have to really, I think, put in front of the center of our mind is that like, we're gonna be raising kids who will live in this world, and what do we want them to bring into this world when they are adults? What kind of values do we want them to stand for and to represent in this world? I think for my work, and this is something I've been like wrestling with in the roughly 48 hours since the election, it's like I've already been moving away from kind of like crass election

analysis kind of stuff. But I think I'm really gonna put a nail in the coffin for that. I really think I'm gonna move, I have no interest in like joining any of the debates that are currently fomenting about sort of like who's to blame and who's to shun or anything. I just don't think,

I don't think I have anything constructive to add to that. I think it's, I think that some of it's like navel gazing, just people trying to again, jockey for positioning. I think that given the position I have, I'm a columnist in the New York Times, I essentially have like tenure, like they're not gonna fire me for anything, barring something truly outrageous.

Barring you make some kind of big booty Latina joke on the podcast. Yeah, yeah, barring that. They're not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not in danger of losing my job for the most part. So I can, I have this, I have all this time and I have these resources. What I think I'm going to try to do is do some of what I already do. We just sort of look to American history to understand the moment, but also to like offer possibilities, offer examples, offer ways of thinking about the country that can be useful, and really try

to expand people's political imagination as much as possible. I think that's a thing I can do with my writing, I think as well. trying to understand the electorate and the country as it is, not as I want it to be, without making any political judgments from that, but just saying this is what the situation is, and like, here's how I think you should understand it, and I'll leave it to you to figure out what you want to do about that. But yeah, I feel like that's what I have to add, to just help people understand and contextualize the moment, the world, their country, and for the people who are engaged in the more practical work,

hopefully they can take something from that. Hopefully they can use that. I'll continue writing about the law, continue writing about the political system. I think it's even in this moment, it's still important to think expansively about the political system, about the things that we might want to change about it. And to write about democracy, the meaning of democracy, why that's important, I think why people have fought and died for it, I think more than ever it's going to be necessary to remind people that these values are still out there, they still matter, they're so important and they should still, one can still fight for them.

And I'll say I do have actually like practical things for people which is that you know Trump won this election, we shouldn't do a Trump you know, Trump won this election. We shouldn't do a Trump won period, he won this election, but we're still gonna have, we're gonna have elections in two years again. Even if they're shenanigans, there's gonna be elections. There's gonna be elections next year. I live in Virginia, we're gonna have

a gubernatorial election next year. Which is to say, there are all these offices. There's like over half a million offices in the United States. They can be contested. They can be won. And it's from winning these offices, A, that you can do some of the work of finding out what moves people and compels people

for telling a new kind of story. You can do kind of the work of like rebuilding a political party from the ground up. But also, winning these offices is a way of defending democratic processes. They keep these things out of the hands of like MAGA freaks. This is actually important. And, you know, winning statewide offices, winning state legislatures,

these give you a position of power and influence in which you can kind of resist the worst of what's coming. So I would actually say to people, now is actually not the time to disengage from the work of politics. Now is the time to look at the board and see what's winnable and go for it and try to win it. Because those offices, someone will hold that office. And would you rather be you or them?

Yeah, that is a wonderful message to end on. This has been fucking incredible. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people find your work at the New York Times? Yes, if people don't read the New York Times, that's totally fine, that's cool. A lot of people don't read the New York Times. And in fact, the amount of obsession

over what the New York Times is writing, to me, I'm like, you know what, the people who put Trump over the top, they weren't reading the New York Times. But if you wanna read my writing, it is F in New York Times. I'm on TikTok, I do TikTok videos. People seem to like them. Your TikTok videos are fantastic.

Thank you. So that's another way you can kind of get my whole thing and I Post on blue skies and times the social media network. I post on letterboxed all the time when I watch movies So I'm not hard to find what's your letterbox profile people want to go add you on letterbox right now My letterbox profiles just at Jay buoy Is Bo you I Bo you IE Someone made years ago, like a Photoshop,

Photoshop my baby photo onto the Illmatic cover, and so that's my profile picture. And so that's me, and you can see all the trash I watch when I'm not working. Oh, this is nothing, I have this podcast with my buddy John Ganz, it's called Unclear and Present Danger, and it's kind of a movie pod podcast as politics podcast We watched kind of the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and we kind of talk about them in their context

We just recorded an episode today on The Saint 1997 the Saint terrible movie it ends up being we end up talking about the election for an hour It ends up being, we end up talking about the election for an hour. But the previous episode was on a film called The Second Civil War by Joe Dante. That was for HBO back in 97. We've done The Fugitive, we've done, you know, lots of stuff. We'll do Air Force One soon. Like it's a lot of, a lot of that stuff. So you can check that out as well.

Sounds great. Thank you so much for being here, Jamel. It's my pleasure. Thank you, Adam. Well, thank you once here, Jamel. It's my pleasure. Thank you, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Jamel for coming on the show. I cannot, again, say enough how much I enjoyed that conversation. I hope you did as well. If you got something out of it,

I hope you will support the show on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits of the show and put it in the credits of every one of my video monologues. This week I wanna thank, I love this first name, Miss Me With The Fascism, great, topical username.

Thank you, Miss Me With The Fascism for your $15 a month contribution. Also Aaron Explosion, Robert Fuss, Game Grumps, Paul McCollum, Rick J. Nash, Birdie Coat, GD Cillia, Howard and Kevin. Thank you so much for your support of the show. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you'd like to join them.

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and give you a hug at the meet and greet after the show. I wanna thank my producer, Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman, everybody here at Headgum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time on Factually. And stay safe, everybody. That was a Headgum Podcast.