Manliness, Cat Ladies, Fertility Panic and the 2024 Election

From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. Presidential elections are too vast and complicated to be about any one thing. But there's sometimes more about one thing than they are about other things. The 2016 election was more about immigration, about who counted as an American. The 2020 election was more about Donald Trump, about what kind of country America was and would become. And the 2024 election is more about gender and family.

Now normally when people say an election is about gender and family, they're saying it's about women, men in politics, men in power. That's the background, that's considered normal. It is when something challenges that or begins to change or a new set of issues and questions come to the fore that they're noticed and they become something we fight over. But that is not what I'm saying, is happening in the 2024 election. It's visions of masculinity that are unstable and contested in this race.

In Donald Trump and in Tim Walls, you have two very different but very explicit archetypes, visions of what it means to be a man. Trump's pitch is built on, I would call it an almost cartoonish overperformance of masculinity, which is aimed at alienated young men. I mean, having Hulk Hogan and the head of the UFC on your night at the convention really puts a sharp point on that.

But in Tim Walls, Democrats have found their own version of a male archetype, a football coach, a soldier, a guy who'll fix your car. But also an ally, a man comfortable being in the role of supporting women, a man unthreaded by social change, a man even excited by it. And then there's family. Dobbs of course put abortion at the center of the election, gave the election huge stakes in terms of reproductive rights.

But the other side of that fight this year, it's not what you might have expected if you've been following the politics of this for decades. It's not the pro-choice movement versus the pro-life movement. It's something newer and stranger, a panic about falling fertility that doesn't just want to ban abortion, though it does want to do that. It wants to shame anyone who doesn't have kids. It wants to undermine their legitimacy as full participants in political.

And I would even say cultural and civilizational life. What does it mean to be pro-family? Is it to support people in finding the life path they want to walk, whether that's becoming a parent or not? It's more or less what Kamala Harris believes. Or is it to use policy and culture to push people to have children, to reward them for having more children, to demean and even punish them for choosing to not have children?

It's more or less what JD Vance and the people who have influenced him, believe. So to understand this election, you need to swim in some ideological currents that most people don't really know are out there. But there are people who spend a lot of time in those waters. Christine Emba is a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of rethinking sex approfcation. Zach Beecham is a senior correspondent at Fox who focuses on politics in the US and abroad.

He just published a book called The Reactionary Spirit, How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Sweeped to the World. And they are the perfect guides on this. As always, my email is a client show at nytimes.com. Christine Emba, Zach Beecham. Welcome to the show. Hey, Ezra, it's going to be back. Thanks for having me. So I want to start by playing a clip from JD Vance's 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson. An interview is now very famous. It's one where he talks about cat ladies.

I think that's what most people have heard from it. But I want to play you a different piece of it. And it's just a basic fact. You look, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? I just wanted to add. I want to zoom in on that last idea. People who don't really have a direct stake in it.

Christine, if you know the ideological world, the JD Vance has become part of. What are you hearing that? What is the clearest version of the argument he's making? I mean, yes, there are a couple of things going on in this statement. First, I think is the idea that the family should be in some ways the center of government that families are the most important part of the nation.

That if you are not part of a family or embedded in this familial web, that you are therefore less committed to the country, I think that we're also seeing JD Vance is suggesting that also having children is kind of the purpose of citizens, a pronatalist policy, basically, that families with children are therefore furthering the nation or making America better and that families without children or people without children. Those aforementioned childless cat ladies are holding America back.

One of the things I wonder on this, Christine, is there are certain kinds of ideological statements that I've heard before. And I always wonder if the people who are saying them fully believe them. They're like, if I sat down with JD Vance and I said, do you believe that nuns don't have a stake in the future of civilization or that your colleague Senator Kim Scott doesn't have a stake in the future of the country? That like an 18 year old kid who goes to war doesn't have a stake in the future.

This is a thing I had heard people say before Vance. I've heard it on the right for years. But is it a thing people actually believe or is it a signifier? What level do you take it? So I think that it's a little bit of both. First of all, when you talk about nuns specifically, you can think about JD Vance's ideological commitments. He converted to Catholicism in 2019 and identified as part of the post liberal, almost integralist, new right.

And within the Catholic faith, obviously, childlessness is a positive state. You're able to be more committed to God and to higher things. And JD Vance and also his wife and interviews have rushed to say that, no, they aren't talking about all childless people. Like, they aren't talking about people who have had fertility issues or nuns or young men going off to war. They may not have said that last one specifically. They're talking about the intentionally childless.

So in some sense, you could say that Vance doesn't necessarily believe the extreme version of what he's saying that all childless people are, in a sense, useless to America. I think if you also look at the ideological background that he comes from, whether it's post liberals or the Catholic integralist or even just the new right generally, there's been an increasing open dislike of those in non-family or non-traditional family situations, whether it's gay people.

JD Vance has spoken about how he would have voted in favor of the defensive marriage act and against LGBTQ rights, whether it's in their terminology when they talk about single women and childless women, there are right-wing influencers who, JD Vance, says, unfortunately very visibly spoken with who have come up with the term awful for affluent, white, female, liberal.

Their conversations about sort of the long house, a place where women rule and men don't have a role in moving the family forward. So yeah, I think he both believes in this, but in a slightly different way than his most extreme statements would make it seem. Zach, I want to key in on those ideological currents that Christine just mentioned. That's his bragged about being, quote, plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures.

You, my friend, are plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures. That is true. That is true. Where's he coming from? So a few seconds ago, Christine mentioned something about post-liberalism. And I think that's a very important term here. It's also a loosely defined one. And that comes from people like law professor Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, who is a political theorist in Notre Dame.

And they basically take an argument or a vision of the world that challenges liberalism emphasis on the individual. Instead of saying the state is meant to be an engine for individual self-fulfillment or to allow people to live life as best they want it, they argue that there's a shared telos, a purpose, a common good to politics. And this is religiously defined, right, for them it's primarily defined by Catholic doctrine. And the purpose of politics should be moving us towards that goal.

And part of that, envisions the nation almost as an organic whole rather than a series of discrete individuals making choices. So it's the question of what is good for the body politic as a unit and that includes perpetuity, survival, children, hence the natalism that's so important in Vance's thought. But this is not the only string. It's just part of a world where many people sort of cross-pollinate.

One of them is the online manosphere, right, a bunch of men who have become extremely resentful about the current state of gender affairs that links back to the stuff about the long house that Christine was just talking about. But that also cross-pollinates a little bit with the tech right, which has its own versions of right-wing ideology, but shares a sort of contempt for democracy and liberalism with these other strains.

And even more of how it can tempt for democracy and in the likes of Peter Tiel and Curtis Yarvand also known as Munchess Moldbug, both of whom are influences on JD Vance sort of directly, right, like he worked in this tech world. And then there's the national conservatives who are sort of the more mainstream face of a lot of this stuff. I heard Vance speak at their conference in 2019 and he made an argument that speech was called against libertarianism or something along those lines.

Now I think that the question conservatives confront at this key moment is this, who do we serve? Do we serve pure unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things? So my answer is simple, I serve my child and it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters.

Vance made a series of arguments that back then weren't very popular but really pre-saged where he was going in terms of the criticism of the state that focused on individual rights and prerogatives. I cannot defend commerce when it's used to addictus toddler brain to screens and it will be used to addictus adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poise into his neighbors without any consequence because those people chose to take those drugs.

You've made this point about the differences between what you call sort of the neo-patriarchy right and the barstool conservatism right. And the barstool conservatism right has been a little less excited about some of what it is hearing from Vance. So can you walk through the difference there? Yeah, these are cross-cutting currents throughout all of those different groups that I described. Neo-patriarchal right is the one that Vance has really aligned itself with.

It's a group that says a major focus of the state should be on fostering traditional morality and family formation. And that means they don't explicitly say women shouldn't be working most of the time, though sometimes they do. But it basically means an emphasize on traditional, loosely defined family structure. So you've got to have kids, you've got to get married, you shouldn't be having sex out of marriage. Birth control is probably bad.

I mean, you can see some of this in the book by the head of the Heritage Foundation, which JD Vance wrote forward to the publications have been delayed, but some of the excerpts have leaked. And he makes exactly this kind of argument about birth control specifically and other family planning choices. So that's one version of conservatism when it comes to views of the family, but another one, which honestly, I think fits Donald Trump a little bit better, is this barstile conservative.

It's a term that's named after barstile sports, the popular sports website, the term was coined by Matthew Walters, a conservative columnist. And Walters argument is that these kinds of conservatives aren't social conservatives like he is, they are people who really are frustrated with the left's control of culture in the same way that the neo-patreon circle right is, but for completely different reasons. They're angry that they can't say sexist stuff in public.

They're angry that sexual harassment has become something whose prohibitions are strictly enforced and they think prevent flirting in the workplace or something like that. They want to be able to see scantily clad women on television. They like seeing cheerleaders at football half-time shows. And these dudes use that term very explicitly because it's like, it really speaks to the self identity, right?

These dudes are very, very different from the people who are telling you to like, you know, don't have sex before marriage, have as family as soon as you can.

And while those distinctions are papered over when they're fighting and at loggerheads against the left in a kind of alliance, they really, really disagree fundamentally on certain key issues and one good way to see this tension come up is the way that Dave Portnoy, who founded Barstowell Sports, got really angry after a rovy way it was overturned. He thought that this was not the state's business to be interfering with abortion.

This tension, it's almost embodied by the Republican ticket, right? Because Donald Trump is nothing if not a Barstowell conservative. Yeah, I wanted to pick up on that, Christine. And I want to play what Trump said about JD Vance's comments, which in a way were a defense, but in a way were a disavowl. Well, first of all, he's got tremendous support. And he really does among a certain group of people, people that like families, you know, he made a statement having to do with families.

That doesn't mean that people that aren't a member of a big and beautiful family with 400 children around and everything else. It doesn't mean that a person doesn't have, he's not against anything, but he loves family. It's very important to him. What do you hear in that, Christine? Well, I mean, it was very clear that Donald Trump was really reaching to make JD Vance's statement sound a little bit less extreme. He's not against anything. Yeah, he doesn't.

He just like people who don't have 400 beautiful children. No, he just likes families, man. He just loves families. But I think it's really interesting what you heard him say in the first part of a statement, almost like the first or second thing that he said was, JD Vance is very popular. Among a certain group of people, which is to say or rather not say not my group of people, but some people really like JD Vance and we have to respect them.

You know, the other thing that he was saying, JD Vance isn't against families. He loves families, but he doesn't want to actually state the policies that JD Vance is in favor of because those are policies that actually could alienate voters. And in fact, already have alienated voters.

He isn't stating the things that JD Vance has said about how no fault divorce has become basically a scourge on the country and that parents who are arguing should stay together for the sake of the kids, even if there is perhaps violence in the relationship, which is something he said in a speech in, I think, 2021. He isn't stating that, you know, JD Vance has voted against a bill that would protect IVF. He isn't talking about JD Vance's statements about abortion.

JD Vance has said that he is against abortion and has previously been against exceptions, even in the case of rape and incest. He has only recently moderated his stance to provide for reasonable exceptions, what he calls them, after he was being considered for the Republican ticket. Because Donald Trump knows that that doesn't really fly with the majority of Americans. And those are seen as pretty extreme views outside of the small group of people who JD Vance really gets along with.

There's a way, Christine, that the imagined voter for Vance and for Trump seems very different to me. So Vance, I think, has wanted to cleave politics around this idea of the family. And I think in his head, you can sort of pit the families against the non-families. Trump, I think, has not been doing that. What I've watched him doing has a lot more to do with masculinity. His night, the final night of the Republican National Convention struck me as, like, gender performance.

It was camp masculinity. I mean, he had Hulk Hogan. He's introduced by the head of the UFC, Dana White. Next year's reported that this was really a strategy. Republicans believed young men are ready to leave the left. That Trump was going to soak his campaign in testosterone and symbols of strength. And Republicans, I think, have had reason to believe that there is a wedge emerging between young men, their politics, and the left. Why?

So, you know, there's always been kind of a marriage gap in voting. So since at least the 1990s, married Americans have voted more consistently for Republican candidates than single Americans have. And there's always been a gender gap in voting, or at least something of a gender gap. Women tend to be slightly more liberal than men. But this gap really has opened up in the past 20 years, especially around and past the 2016 election, especially young women versus young men.

And I think the Republican Party has identified this as a fruitful opening, especially after the MeToo movement, after the 2016 election. After all, the things happened the late 2010s regarding gender. I think it just became a more salient issue for both sexes. Women were awakened to the idea and clarity of sex discrimination, feeling that it wasn't something that had happened in the past, the idea that Roe v. Wade could be overturned and then was kind of cemented that vision in women's minds.

And they have begun voting more on feminist principles. Men on the other hand, and especially young men, many of them, I would say, not all of them, seem to have seen many of those movements as attacks on men and attacks on masculinity. So men and especially young men are more likely to say that they are not feminist and that they have experience discrimination due to their sex. That gap has grown significantly. And Republicans are willing to exploit that.

Isn't there something to that, at least aesthetically, that the left became in this period? I wouldn't say hostile to men and their interests, but maybe to masculinity, you had all the interest female shirts and I drink male tears mugs and talk of toxic masculinity was everywhere. But that got picked up.

And now you see, if you're looking at a 2020 voter intentions and polling up till now, though this may have changed in some of the newer Harris polling, but at least when Biden was running, you would move from young men being in support of Joe Biden in 2020 to being heavily for Donald Trump in 2024, you have the sort of wide online atmosphere. I mean, there is a sense that the left became hostile to what you might call masculinity.

Yeah. As a result, so I think you're actually observing something really real and I would agree with you there. I mean, first of all, we kind of have to think of the material conditions of the last couple of decades. So we've seen a shift in the economy away from kind of traditional and perhaps masculine favoring, manufacturing jobs and labor jobs to social skills jobs that have tended to favor or at least allow women to enter the marketplace.

You know, post the 1970s, women who were previously kind of barred or kept out of schools and employment entered the workforce and entered the educational market and have really succeeded. And in many cases are outpacing men. Right now, you know, we're seeing men only earn about 74 bachelors degrees for everyone hundred that women earn. Wages for men, especially working class men, have basically stagnated since the 1970s or even declined.

Wages for men everywhere except the very top of the economic ladder. And so I think that men now in competition with women generally are feeling a little bit of anxiety, perhaps more than a little bit, I would say, kind of anxiety and uncertainty about where they fit in America, both in a social sense and in the economy. So that stress was kind of already on the ground and underlying our political landscape. And then, you know, women have, as I just mentioned, really succeeded.

And there has been a lot of discussion about how women are succeeding. You mentioned the futurist female t-shirts Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. I'm with her sort of foregrounding the fact that it was a woman running now. It was a woman's time to lead. I think that that has felt a little bit exclusionary towards certain men or at least has been taken as exclusionary towards men.

And then especially around the Me Too moment in 2018, when the bad behavior, the terrible behavior of certain men became really noticeable. And women were felt compelled to speak out about their own experiences. You know, there wasn't just a pushback against specific bad men, although many speakers and pundits tried to be more specific. But there was a general aura that, you know, masculinity was a bad thing. And yeah, a lot of men, I think, felt attacked.

They felt that women were not just succeeding, but actually holding them back and discriminating against them. In real life, I think this was not necessarily the case. I think that men and women clearly need each other to survive. But the discourse, especially the popular discourse on shows, on TV, on podcasts, on the t-shirts that women were running around, did seem, I think, offensive to a large group of men and made them resentful.

So as I can imagine a second ago, the National Conservatism Conference. But the 2021 iteration of that, Senator Josh Hawley, who's part of this rising new riot, a sort of contemporary of JD Bands, he gives a speech that I want to play a bit of for you here. It was about quote, the less attempt to give us a world beyond men. They are messages. This nation needs to be taught how unjust it is to begin with and then completely remain from top to bottom. That's the leftist project.

That's their grand ambition. You've deconstruct the United States of America. This work of deconstruction is what unites today's left and draws together all of their various projects. From critical race theory to their economic socialism to their bizarre war on women's sports. But what I want you to notice, what I want to call out tonight, is that the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men. The left wanted to find traditional masculinity as toxic.

They wanted to find the traditional masculine virtues, things like courage and independence and assertiveness as a danger to society. This is an effort that the left has been at for years now and they have had alarming success. What do you hear when you hear that? What role did that particular set of ideas that conservatism is a defense of traditional masculinity and the traditional masculinity needs to be defended begin to play on the right?

I hear something that I write about in my new book, The Reactionary Spirit.

While I hear a little bit of the reactionary spirit in there, what Holly is trying to speak to, and you can see this in sort of the broad arc of his work and his conservative fellow travelers work, is it a belief that there has been a fundamental dislocation of gender relations and Americans sense of self and place and how they find themselves through their families and through gender relations defining a role and a pathway forward in life?

It is not explicitly stated as women belong in the home. I mean, Josh Holley's wife is an attorney who has argued before the Supreme Court. I don't think that would be his position, at least if it was, it would be profoundly hypocritical.

But rather that certain Americans have been left behind, not just by economic terms, but in social terms, in the sense that sexual liberation was part of a series of changes that made the world illegible to a lot of people, created a sense that everything was on your

own, you were making your own choices, you were going wherever you wanted, and that part of what was thrown out there was traditional masculinity, a sense that boys and men knew the kind of person they wanted to grow into, the kind of person they wanted to become, what virtues there were for them, that all of that being pushed away by the feminist revolution has been very harmful for men and boys.

You hear this from someone like Holley, there's a certain version of it that comes from the term as reactionary feminists, which is a sort of very small intellectual movement of feminists who argue that much of what happened in the 1960s ended up hurting women rather than helping them. And so Holley's really trying to tap into that and turn this sense of male dislocation and social disorder into a weapon, a political weapon against liberals and liberalism.

He sort of located the inciting change there as a sexual revolution. When I listened to Vance, when I listened to people who influenced him, like Patrick Deneen, who you mentioned earlier, I hear it is more on one level philosophical liberalism almost entirely, the sort of individual supposed to the family, change is supposed to tradition, cities is supposed to sort of more rural, more traditional ways of living.

And I also hear it in the much more modern and I think awkwardly grafted on critique of trade policy, of immigration, of manufacturing jobs being lost. The sort of, I think for Vance and for some of these people, the way the economics comes into play here, is it we let these masculine jobs, these traditional communities get hollowed out by China and then in the void left by them, what we were placed them with was as Christine

put it, these social skills jobs, like this in a Richard Reeves now, who has written I think a very good book on the problems men are facing and he's saying, you know, we need to get more male nurses, we need to get more male teachers, we need to get more male childcare workers.

And I think these guys would say, no, we need to go back that there's a certain kind of economy that works for men and because it works for men, it works for families, or at least these kinds of families and that we need that. That is sort of my understanding of how it all fits together, but you've studied this more deeply than I have, so how would you amend that? I think the point that you made about it being awkward is a good one, right?

Because it doesn't really make sense as a narrative, why can't men be nurses? Really? Why? There's no explanation here. It's just sort of implied in the discourse that there's something bad about this, something that has disadvantaged men, right? And it's never spelled out how these economic changes, like specifically what about men makes them losing as a result of this or causes a loss. And I think that the glue that sticks it all together, I mean, there's two versions of it, right?

And in the popular one, the glue is nostalgia, is a sense that there was a time where things were better for men and for everybody. And that men, men going into the coal mines, men going into the factory, men doing manly things. And that's just sort of symbolic of a non-specified, like there's no one year, everyone's like, yeah, we should go back to that one, but it's sort of like stylized and imaginary 1950s, I would say, in which things were more stable for a lot of Americans.

And that stability was produced by the existence of these male-coded jobs. Actually, as I think that you're on to something that makes a lot of sense, I think that the way that you're putting it together shows that it does hang together. I think that at least the Vance Wing of the Republican Party and Holly in his statements, there's sort of younger Republicans like Mark Rubio as well. Their vision is rooted in maybe nostalgia, but also sort of a traditionalism.

And also, I think a religious-based sense that there is something different about what men do, men are ideally providers. They have different impulses. So of course, they don't fit in an economy where they're asked to do that. And I think Holly in Vance and this group of Republicans are hoping to sort of bring that gender essentialism back to the fore. And I think we've talked about post-liberalism a lot. And we've mentioned the name Patrick D'Nina a lot.

And actually his first book that came out that was actually kind of a huge deal to the point that Barack Obama even recommended in his books of the summer, the year that it came out, was literally called Why Liberalism Failed. And it was an argument against both economic and personal liberalism, this idea that growth was the best thing and that people should be maximizing their individual choices and that that was the way forward.

He argued in fact that GDP and growth were not necessarily the most important thing, that again, this idea of human flourishing, positive human lives in a human community were more important.

And then as I think you had Orrin Cass on your podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he with his Think Tank American Compass, which is actually a pretty new outgrowth, talks pretty clearly about the economic shifts and what Republicans or conservatives, the sort of new right, the new conservative movement should prioritize in government. And again, we think about the economic shifts of the 1970s and say, well, we exported more jobs opened up, women were in the labor market.

We are trading with China, the GDP has risen, right? The economy has grown. And actually I think the sort of post liberal view that Vance supports would suggest that the economy growing, the GDP growing is not necessarily a good thing, or rather it shouldn't be the highest goal. The highest goal should be sort of family fulfillment, flourishing of American citizens that allows them to make strong marriages, to have children.

And so if it's a GDP growth that seems to be benefiting women at the expense of men, or the economy is growing, but men don't have the jobs that they used to have in our dying of deaths of despair instead of working, that growth actually isn't that useful. And so I think that's how you can synthesize this sort of protectionist and isolationist moves with this gender ideology.

Yeah, I do think the interview that I did with Orn Cass a few weeks, a few months, it's been a very intense time period here is useful for this, but also I patriced a knee-naughty year or two ago. And it's very much about these and I think a very revealing conversation in this election where Republicans have sort of been turned into the weird ones, maybe have become the weird ones. The wedge I see some of them still trying to use is trans issues.

You can see that in J.D. Vance trying to turn around the weird label in this online video. The people who call me weird want to give like hormone therapies and sterilize nine-year-olds. I think it's a lot weirder. Oh, man. Me just like living a normal life with my kids and my wife, but this is what they do I think is they latch onto a message and they try to sell it even if it's fake. What do you think of that, Christine?

You know, one of the things that I think has been very unsettling to the men who are, in many cases now, sort of core supporters of Trump and the Maga movement, is the idea of gender being flexible. The idea of trans rights in America that there could be trans people in public or trans people in schools or even gasp using the bathroom is really unsettling to the secure vision of gender that the right had embraced.

What J.D. Vance is trying to do in this clip is make the sort of unsettling nature of transness, the unsettling nature of alternative sexual identities feel very salient to voters as a way to suggest that yes, the Democrats are doing something weird with gender that's unsettling, that's coming for your kids and that Republicans are on the literal straight and narrow and will save you from that. Republicans talk about themselves as the party of family.

J.D. Vance talks about being very pro family. I mean, since 2016, QAnon has been just obsessed with the idea of people praying on children to the point of totally insane conspiracy theories in that clip, J.D. Vance talks about how the left wants to sterilize children.

They have tried to brand Tim Walsh's tampon Tim because he pushed public schools to put tampons and pads in the boys' bathrooms as if this was somehow going to hurt boys to see a box of pads in their bathroom, talking constantly about not just drag queens or pride parades, but drag queen story hours for kids and pride parades that walk past children.

This idea that trans people are a threat to the young specifically and that the left or liberals somehow want to hurt children or make children change in a way that's unhealthy for them makes the idea seem much scarier both to those deep into conservative and other politics, but also perhaps to the average voter who isn't that interested necessarily in trans sports or LGBT issues, but wants kids to be safe.

J.D. Vance, QAnon, QAnon The other thing I want to add is that trans issues play a really important gluing role in the conservative coalition. We've been talking a lot about the distinction between bar stool conservatives and sort of neo-patriarchal conservatives, one way that you get people who have such different views on gender and social roles to align is by creating a shared enemy and trans people are for different reasons disfavored by both groups.

The traditional conservatives for the reasons that Christine was just talking about and the bar stool types because they see trans people, I mean partly it's just the old Iqfactor that you used to hear about during gay marriage conversations before that was an issue that was won by the left. They just find it weird and creepy, but the second part of it is that trans people are seen as the tip of the liberal repressive sphere, right?

The idea that people can't tell you to call a man a woman or woman a man in their view and that you're, if you do that all of a sudden you're dead naming someone, whatever that means, right? Like that kind of gut don't tell me how I see other people and how I should talk is a lot of what a bar stool type is reacting against what makes them conservatives as a sense that liberalism and its ideas impose oppression on them by controlling the way that they can talk and think.

And so for these two factions they can both agree that liberal should not be allowed to be deciding what gender means or changing the way that bathrooms work or letting men into women's sports in their view. The sports one is a really, really big connective issue one that speaks to the deep anxieties of both sides here.

So yeah, trans women in sports in particular embodies the way in which one issue can unite the right on gender even as they disagree very fundamentally about the overarching question gender roles. This to me is one reason the question of trans participation in sports has become like such a dominant obsession on the right.

And like from my perspective you probably want to have a nuanced take on this because different sports are different and you know the questions we create in their categorization of competition is different. Like I get why people are unsettled over it. But the bar stool conservatism world is so sports oriented, right? I mean I almost have never heard Jorogan speak with as much fury as he has in terms of you know allowing trans women into various combat sports.

I mean the bar stool conservators want to be left alone but they really want sports left alone. You've seen JD Vance trying to imply that a boxer at the Olympics is trans which she is not but is trying to expand this conflict to the Olympics. You really see it in their efforts to make this a central issue in American politics.

It's a perennial source of outrage where you can say this thing happened and exemplifies the destruction of fairness and the way that liberals are tearing apart the way that the world ought to operate. Being able to happen this realm of fairness in sports is really important because it's a sense that there's something wrong that's why it's so focused on trans women not trans men as being the issue.

It's just going to be I think for a while like Ezra to your point there's a nuanced way to talk and think about this. There is but because it's such good culture or red meat that nuanced perspective is just like not going to be out there in the world for quite some time. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the world wide movement.

The gender dimension, these arguments about family, these arguments about masculinity, how much is this a thing that is happening specifically in the American context right now has to do with our culture and our movements and how much is something we're seeing cross nationally? It's a great question because the cross national picture is really complicated.

But I would say that the way that I define the reactionary spirit in the book is when a movement inside a democracy that supports a certain set of social hierarchies is seeing a gallitarian change happen through democratic means they're faced with the choice.

That choice is either accept that change might happen through democratic means and try to sand off what they see as the worst edges or else try to go outside of democracy and take authoritarian maybe even extra legal steps necessary to prevent democracy from leading to changes in social hierarchy.

I think that's really important because the feminist revolution is not just happening in the United States and the feminist revolution which someone like Denine would argue is an outgrowth of liberalism. He would say that's bad. I think that's true and it's good. It's happened across the world. This is not just an American thing.

So people committed to traditional gender norms everywhere are grappling with changes to family structure to women entering the workforce to the idea that certain things that they took for granted are sexist. And the result of that becoming a major part of our social and political world is being felt again everywhere, not just in the United States. And this becomes a very potent political fuel for reactionary political movements.

So in Hungary for example, which I think is one of the most sterling examples of democracy backsliding into authoritarianism powered by sort of reactionary sentiment, gender politics are at the forefront of the government's pitch to voters. And it's still neat even though it's an authoritarian state the way that it's set up still depends on getting votes like actual real votes.

And so a large portion of its message is saying we are the party of the traditional family defending it against whatever kind of enemy is coming in. Not just immigrants but leftists at home, the European Union quote unquote gender ideology which is referring to the LGBT movement. But all of this is centered around the idea of preserving the Hungarian nation.

And perhaps the example that people cite the most when they talk about a country where gender is becoming the center of politics of South Korea, which is it's really true. The current president of South Korea won office on a pitch to disaffected men. And gender conflict has really become maybe the cultural battlegrounds inside South Korea. But that's not normal. It's not true in most countries.

The degree to which gender has become the dominant issue in different countries is very, very, very, very different and depends on a lot of specific local circumstances. I'm glad you brought in South Korea here because South Korea has a specifically intense version of a problem that we've talked about glancingly here, but I think it's pretty central to the thinking on the right, which is South Korea's fertility rate has become extremely low.

If I'm remembering this correctly, I think it's 0.8 when you need about 2.1, 2.2 for a replacement. So South Korea is a society that is something doesn't change and has been going on for a while and it has not been changing. That is on the verge of really radical shrinkage, which is already creating problems is going to create profound problems. But America is also beneath replacement rate fertility. And this has become, I think almost a kin on the right to what climate change is on the left.

It is the problem that is the context for all future problems, the problem that is actually existential. I'm going to play a clip here from a Tucker Carlson interview with Elon Musk. And I think we just want to make sure that we have civilization go onward and upward. And that's for example why I'm concerned about decreasing both rates and the fact that for example Japan had twice as many deaths last year as both. So that's, and they're leading indicators.

This is, can I say, and you've written and talked a lot about this, but can I ask you to pause just for a parenthetical note, why is that? I mean, the urge to have sex and to procreate is after breathing and eating the most basic urge. How has it been subverted? So in the past, we could rely upon simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate. But once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy limb against instinct, but not to procreate.

So we haven't yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, you know, last 50 years or so, for the poor birth control. I'm sort of worried that, hey, civilization, if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble. Does the old question of, like, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it's currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.

Christine, tell me about the role these fears are playing on the right and the sort of different ideas here, they may be tied together. So one of the things that is unspoken in this clip, but seems very important, is the idea that citizens have to create the citizens to replace them in whatever country they're in, which sort of negates the idea that immigration could be a possible way to help expand a society or prop up a civilization.

This idea that, you know, immigration can't be used to replace the population. That, in fact, immigration is a bad thing and we should be wary of it.

Is, you know, a huge part of the Republican Party's platform, it's this idea of the great replacement theory, is something that the right has mentioned often, and that Tucker Carlson mainstreamed on his show, that Democrats and liberals are somehow going to bring in immigrants to replace American citizens who aren't having enough children to fill up America by themselves, basically, and that this is a bad thing.

So often when you see, you know, conservatives talking about a lack of family formation, they're kind of talking about a specific kind of family that aligns with their ideals, which is why even though there's a lot of talk about how Americans aren't having enough children, how there aren't enough babies, how we're below replacement rate, politicians like JD Vans have still voted against policies that would, you know, allow Americans to access IVF and fertility treatments.

There is kind of the right kind of family that's supposed to be reproducing, and that's the family that they're worried about. I want to add something, which is that apocalypse is an imagined or real, tell you a lot about a political movement.

And one thing I think that's really interesting, and we can talk specifically about the American context here, is the shift in the sort of conservative vision of a future apocalypse from being the debt and the deficit, which used to be really the centerpiece of conservative fears about the future.

And that's declined in prominence in conservative movement rhetoric with a lot of the family formation stuff and declining birth rates becoming a much more central theme and not an economically framed one. It's not the typical, well, if we don't have enough babies, then we're not going to be able to pay for social security or for the welfare state anymore, which is, you know, a big theme in a country like Japan when they talk about the nature of their birth rate crisis.

It's this existential kind of civilization stuff you heard Elon Musk talking about, that there's the death of a country when it doesn't have enough children, and then it dies. And in some ill-defined way, it's not like a specific set of mechanisms kick off, right? And then the government literally crumbles. That civilization in some broad sense dies without enough children. And I think this speaks to the changing nature of the political right.

Like when I talk about in the book, right, is that politics in general has moved away from having a material foundation, right, where primarily divisions about class and questions of the distribution of wealth materially defined the division between left and right and towards more cultural issues. And gender is one of them, a really, really, really important one. It's more or less salient in different countries based on, again, particular circumstances.

But the trend towards post-material politics is true across the advanced democratic world. And at the same time, they express these fears in kind of off-putting ways, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk in particular. The mix systems. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that that's what people are thinking about when they're deciding whether or not to reproduce. That's my limbic system up to.

But one can say, and I think that, you know, Vance has tried to better and worse effect to kind of pull this out policy-wise, that there is something to be worried about when citizens, when young people in a country feel like they can't have children or can't reproduce, can't have a family. Yeah. Again, this idea of human flourishing, what does it mean to live sort of a good life and a happy life? It's that, you know, if you're living a good and happy life, you want to further it.

You want to bring more people into that life. And the fact that Americans or young Americans, Carlson and Musk worry, feel unwilling to do that, suggested there is something wrong with the American atmosphere, the American spirit, the American life today. That's what they see as a civilizational decline and a civilizational end. There's a reason I picked a Tucker Elon clip, which is one that the Tucker and Elon are known to have been pushing Donald Trump to choose JD Vance. Right?

They see him as one of their own. But also that I think it makes some sense of where Vance and people like him have gone in this. So if you take sort of the argument Elon Musk makes, which is that birth rate decline is a civilizational crisis, that it stems from birth control and abortions and quote, what not, making it possible to satisfy our desire to have sex with each other to put it in a little less limbic terms, but then subverts the natural outcome of that.

And you put that together and you have a real problem, right? You have something that we have broken the evolutionary logic of humankind. And different people have sort of different visions of this. I think one reason you see a lot of these people converting to Catholicism is partially a view that religions and particularly more traditionalist ones, like the form of Catholicism that a lot of these converts embrace are a kind of fertility technology. Their religious societies have more children.

This is cultural, you can't just solve this with policy. But I think it also gets it why Vance speaks about people without children the way he does, right? That speaking about them as a kind of parasitic mass as something that is aberrant, as something that should be made socially uncomfortable to be, right? I mean, all these people to my knowledge, they understand that lots of societies have tried to use policy to change the fertility rate and nobody has been all that successful.

And I think their view is that you have to make not having children socially unacceptable. Tax policy might help you there in the Vance version of it and expanded child tax credit though it's worth saying that he has not actually been a consistent or significant proponent of that or a supporter of it. He wasn't even there on the recent child tax credit vote. But it's not strong enough.

And what you need to do is go back to the kind of thing that we used to have where I think probably religion, but maybe nationalism recasts you as outside the circle of productive citizen, the circle of good person. If you are not having children, right? Like I think within that framework, it all kind of makes sense why you can't just speak about it as, you know, a choice we should support.

You have to speak about the other choice as something that has to be turned into a kind of mark of social dishonor. Yeah, post liberalism takes us. It's founding premise, right? It's the most basic idea is that liberalism isn't just like a political system. It's not, you know, individual rights. It's not a constitution. It's not even a sort of premise that individual should be freed of life as they want. It's a set of social norms.

It's a very specific set of ideas about what it means to live a good life and that liberalism is not neutral on the good in the way that a liberal like John Rawls would say it is. Liberalism is pushing a liberal lifestyle on everybody. And you know, today this gets cashed out in terms of, you know, liberal controls over the institutions, right? People and universities in the media in all sorts of other positions of power, changing culture in ways that promote a liberal lifestyle.

And a liberal lifestyle on their vision is one of key dynistic self-placiar. It's one of just putting yourself above everything else, doing whatever you want, however you feel like it, and letting obligations to communities and organizations and all of that fall by the wayside. And this idea, right, fits very nicely with what you're saying, as right?

I think it's actually at the root of it because they see being childless as the epitome of this liberal self-valorization of saying, I'm so important that the continuity of my society doesn't matter to me, right? What I care about is doing whatever I feel like right now and my ties to these broader sets of institutions, to a church, to a community, to a neighborhood, to a country are less important than, I don't know, being able to go to brunch at a weekend, right?

That is their stylized vision of liberalism. I don't think this is correct, but it's at the heart of this particular critique and at the heart of the solution being not necessarily policy per se, but policy in service of creating a new set of social ethosis, one that is avowedly illiberal, right? And tells individuals there's a good way to live a life, and the one that you need to be following, the one that the state should be promoting is marriage and children.

I'm curious where this ends up cashing out in policy because I have found this whole movement of people incredibly slippery here. So I had Patrick Deneen on the show, the sort of post-liberal Catholic thinker. And we had this whole, I would call it, bizarre conversation, and I recommend people go listen to it. Or part of it was, I just ended up spending a long time asking, like, do you support repealing no fault divorce?

And he was like, well, no, I mean, maybe, no. It was very clear to me in that that the things that logically followed from the arguments he was making, he understood to be political poison. And I think an interesting thing about Vance is that in his effort over the past couple of years to rise to the top of this group of people, it become their champion, he's been willing to publicly bite bullets that even they wouldn't have bitten, right?

Like he has actually talked about why women should stay in violent marriages. He has talked about giving people with kids more votes than people without kids. He makes economic arguments. I've looked at this guy's economic policies. He is not proposing anything, anything, anything, anything that he's even remotely of a size that it might change fertility rates as far as I can tell. That's a hard thing to do anyway, but he's definitely not in that neighborhood.

He attacked at some point, Kamala Harris for not supporting a child tax credit. Every Kamala Harris was a leader in the Senate of expanding the child tax credit. And then as vice president, cast a tie-breaking vote to expand the child tax credit. But also, JD Vance does not himself have a very significant new child tax credit plan. He has not offered anything that is beyond the boundaries of what we have seen in American life.

There was this coming book from the Heritage Foundation, President Heritage Foundation is where Project 2025 was. JD Vance wrote the forward to it. As Zach mentioned at some point in this conversation, this book among other things is very skeptical of birth control of IVF. They are now delaying publication of the book till after the election because again, it is political poison.

I mean, you begin to understand why this group of people, particularly the ones who are not running for office, are validly pretty skeptical of democracy because the things that might get them, I think in their heads at least, to where you'd want to go, they're not democratically sellable. They're things you can't even say aloud. Sure. Well, yeah, I think you're on to something very important here.

And it's interesting if you look back in sort of the political evolution of JD Vance, who some of his influences are. So I think Zach mentioned Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Menchius Moldbug, who is a sort of alt-right conservative thinker who's also close friends with Peter Teal, JD Vance's political mentor. And Yarvin has written kind of explicitly actually that democracy is no longer working.

And in fact, he is in favor of a sort of monarchist state where there is a ruler at the top who implements laws that shape society. That's explicitly anti-democratic. And JD Vance has been in close conversation with him. But in general, I think we also should note that JD Vance has what I would term kind of a millennial problem, right? In that all of his sort of podcasts, his writing, his previous thinking is kind of on the record. It's there on the internet for people to find.

You know, his political rise has been quite fast. He was talking to and trying to ingratiate himself with and making relationships in this neo-conservative alt-right, far-right sphere and was very much open to coming out in favor of these extreme policy positions, whether it was the idea of an anti-democratic state and taking the levers of power. He talked about in the past how actually if Republicans get into power, they should fire the entirety of the administrative state and start over.

But then he has to go into public and talk to the entirety of America now. And I think he's realizing or has realized perhaps a little bit too late that the arguments that are very persuasive and seem even common on these online forums and in these integralist or post-liberal online spaces, you're right, just don't translate to normal people. And so in fact, it just sounds sort of weird and scary to us.

Yeah, the thing I would add is in the book, I try to trace the way in which anti-democratic rhetoric has evolved over time. And one thing that strikes me is that people don't really go after democracy directly anymore, at least if you're trying to destroy democracy that's already established. Donald Trump didn't say we should get rid of elections in 2020. He said votes were stolen from me. Yes, and now he sells himself as the guy who took a bullet for democracy, right? It's his line on it.

Yeah, it's his line, right? And that I think that's a really, this is kind of under-discussed, I think, but it's a profound shift in the way that anti-democratic politics works and reflects the fact that democracy has become and still is, right, the ideological language that we all speak.

And so you get this kind of double discourse where there's frustrations with the way the democratic system works and the forces that it empowers, but an unwillingness to directly leverage critiques of it in ways that are open and naked and clear, right, as to where they're coming from. And I think this is true increasingly, not just for democracy, but for its allied concept liberalism. I think a lot of these people underestimated how liberal the population they were trying to appeal to was.

And they end up realizing that what they're talking about, even when they attack elements of liberalism that are unpopular, the solutions they propose as alternatives run into the problems as are they that you were just describing. So I think this this anti-liberal movement is running up against the problem that liberalism and democracy are very much a package deal for a lot of people.

The ideas are deeply intertwined with each other and many of the attacks or the sort of ideas and criticisms of liberalism that they're leveraging strike people not just as weird, but also as in a deep sense opposed to the values that a citizen of a democracy that they hold most here. So I want to turn to the Democrats. Justine, how would you say they're treating gender this year? Because it feels to me since Harris has become the presumptive or even actual now nominee.

It feels subtly different than in the past couple of elections. Yeah, I think you're right about that. So I think one way to talk about this is to compare this election with a female presidential candidate to the last election with a female presidential candidate, 2016 Hillary Clinton. So I mentioned earlier in the podcast that Hillary's campaign slogan was, I'm with her sort of foregrounding the revolutionary possibility of the first female president.

Kamala Harris on the other hand has not actually spent very much time. In fact, any time at all really talking about the idea that she could be the first female president. While she has back-rated her own gender and sort of her own identity in this race so far, what we are seeing is foregrounding gendered concerns specifically around abortion.

I think that we're seeing Democrats make the DOBS decision, one of the defining elements of their campaign, talking about how the reversal of Roe v. Wade was bad for women and anti-democratic and placing that squarely on the Republicans plates. And I actually think that this is perhaps maybe a wise strategy for Democrats. We talked earlier in the podcast about how there is this increasing gender gap and how young women and women in particular have become increasingly politically awakened.

And what would say perhaps even radicalize an elect for direction by the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the me too moment and the visions of sort of patriarchy that they saw behind that by simply the presence of Donald Trump on the political scene. So gender has become much more salient for women. It is an exciting factor for women, exciting not in the happy way, but that it excites a lot of emotion.

JD Vance has, I think, unintentionally put more logs on the fire here by making basically his entire identity. I don't think he meant to do this, but it has happened, making his entire identity seem centered around insulting childless cat ladies, insulting women who presumably have made their own choices or even didn't make a choice and don't necessarily feel that happy about it.

And I think that the Democratic Party is going to use that, this idea of supporting women and pushing against people who appear not to support women. We were talking a second, go Zach, about the way on the right, the rhetoric has run ahead of the policy. And I think dobs has allowed the Democrats to be in a much more solid, reverse position because it's a lot of Democrats to talk about gender in a specific and tangible and normal and policy oriented way instead of this abstract ideological one.

It's not an election about ending the patriarchy or recognizing implicit misogyny. It's about abortion. It's about row. It's about IVF. It's about your ability to get birth control in the mail. And it seems to me that this is a loud Harris to keep things grounded in a way that, you know, I think Hillary Clinton made them sort of more symbolic, more philosophical, more ideological. Anyway, it's also been an interesting contrast from Vanson in a different way.

Trump, who don't have a way of saying, this is the thing we are going to do for you. They have a way of describing who they like and don't like and the society they want and don't want. Whereas Harris is like, elect me and the thing I will do is try to pass the row protections through Congress. Yeah. If you listen to Harris's speeches or Tim Walsh's for that matter, there's one word that they use over and over and over again. That word is freedom.

There's a reason Harris's campaign song is literally freedom by Beyoncé. It's that freedom is the master concept that they want to latch on to. There's good reason for that. Freedom is one of those contested American values that used to be the centerpiece of Republican rhetoric. There's a lot of polling recently. I've talked to the pollsters who've done it who show that if you can convince voters that Republicans are anti-freedom and dobs was really the opening here.

Dobs and election denial and trying to steal the 2020 election. They're going after your freedom to have the family you want and your freedom to vote. Those two things end up becoming really, really powerful in making Democrats seem like the live and let live party, the one that wants to embody the American ethos of freedom. That's the master narrative that Harris is trying to use these policies to sell. She's not just saying vote for me because my policies will give you a better world.

What she's saying is vote for me because I'm the one who stands up for this essential American and crucially liberal value of freedom. That's how this entire thing connects. If JD Vance wants to be the candidate of post-liberals, Harris is saying great. Basically, I'm going to be the candidate of liberalism. I'm going to be the candidate of liberalism. I'm for freedom. What are you for?

Weird attacks on childless cat ladies and vague ideas about a structured society that you don't even really want to own because they're unpopular. It's put her on immensely, immensely effective rhetorical ground, whether that's enough to carry her to victory. That's the political rhetoric doesn't matter. It's that much. That it can be single-handedly swinging election unless it's very, very close for other reasons.

But, man, this post-liberal gambit as a pure political matter has put Republican Republicans in the uncomfortable position of being the anti-freedom party. I think that's all very right. But also, you mentioned Tim Walls there, Zach and Christine. I think Walls is interesting in this election, both for his own role and for what it says about how Democrats are thinking and talking about gender.

Because we talked earlier about the way I would say in 2016 and 2020, Democrats develop this very complicated and I would say, or liberals online, liberals maybe. This complicated and suspicious relationship to masculinity. Tim Cain was Hillary Clinton's vice president or her vice presidential pick, but I would not say he was there in any articulated or obvious way for gender. She just liked them. Walls is there among other things, but clearly for his performance of masculinity, right?

There's a very Judith Butler dimension to the Walls pick. The football coach, national guard, straight talking, midwesterner. How do you see Walls playing into this? Yeah. In the past, Republicans have put themselves forward as the party of men, the party of masculinity. The Democrats, the liberals are sort of the female party.

But Tim Walls versus that vision of masculinity is turning that vision on its head in the same way that Republicans seem to have gone from the party of freedom to the anti-freedom party. They have gone from the party of real masculinity of men who shoot guns and work in the yard to, I don't know, world wrestling federation performers.

Whereas Democrats seem to have gone or are trying to go from a party of feminized soy boys as they used to be insulted by Republicans to, yes, the party of Tim Walls. A dad, a dad who wears a camouflage hat. They're the meme circulating of him online or a guy from the Midwest who's straight talking, loves eating meat and will help you fix your car when it's on the side of the road. And this is a vision of masculinity that is still very stereotypically masculine.

I mean, as you say, he's a football coach. He was in the military. But also positive, one might call it a tonic masculinity. He's male, but he's helpful. He supports women, but he says he's not trying to be in their business and legislate how they should use their Uterai. Republicans used to be the people talking about freedom. Not this group. When they talk about freedom, it means that the government should be free to invade your exam room with your doctor.

Look, in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. We make, we maybe wouldn't make the same choices, but we respect them. And I know in Minnesota and in Arizona, in places across this country, you know what makes society work best is when you learn a golden rule. Mind your own damn business. Hands on damn business. You don't need it.

He's talked about in his interviews how he views the Republican Party as having become what he termed the he-man-woman haters club as opposed to presumably his party. The Democratic Party, where men are there and they're helpful, but they also love women. So this is a vision of masculinity that I think Democrats think will play across America. It's a very recognizable one, but it's a friendly one. It's a down to earth one.

It's not a frightening one in the same way that Donald Trump was trying to portray, but an approachable one. I don't know how to describe this exactly, but something I've noticed in this whole process that led to walls. And really the whole movement to the Harris campaign is this emergence of playfulness around things that Democrats treated with incredible heaviness a couple of years ago. So there's a movement from Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy to He's a weirdo.

Online, it was completely understood that Kamala Harris was looking for the most white male white male in the Midwest she could find. Maybe you'd also consider Andy Bashir, maybe you'd consider Pete Buttigieg, but there was a jokingness about it. The white dudes for Harris call had this too. I don't know. They're holding it all a lot more lightly. They liked walls in the end, among other things, because there's a playfulness to him.

I thought it was very telling how in the speech he gave on being introduced as vice president or vice presidential candidate, he talked about the importance of Harris's joy. But it's not just that they're happier in the race all of a sudden, but that they're willing to be a little bit self mocking. A lot of things here have had a slight irony to them that I've really not seen from the Democratic coalition in a minute. I mean, I think there's two things going on here.

Is first the internal left culture war that began really in 2020, the series of cascading fights surrounding hoaxness or whatever you want to call it, it's really petered off. The energy that used to surround those topics is gone. And I think this is one of those half-baked thoughts that I think is true, but I'm going to pause it as a theory here.

But is that there's kind of been a truce, a sense that, okay, some people went a little bit too far in the way that they were talking about identity and privileging it and giving it this to a topic significance and building politics around it in 2020, but it's also the case that the people who were so vehemently against that and demanding the party return to some version where we didn't really acknowledge or talk about identity concerns. That didn't win the day either, right?

It's not like we've returned to a pre-2020 Democratic party. It's like the identity revolution in left-wing politics has been incorporated into the liberal coalition, but it has done so in a way that sanded off the self-righteousness that a lot of people found unappealing about it. So it's kind of a happy synthesis, not just a ceasefire, but a peace agreement that created a kind of new understanding of what the left is.

And the second thing that I think is very important in this is that people got really tired of being upset all the time. It is really, really, really hard to sustain high levels of anger and duchin about virtually everything that's happening. And there's also a recognition that this kind of general bad vibes thing is bad for democracy, it's bad for our society, right?

It's like when people don't believe that the country is going in a good direction when they don't have faith in social institutions, that stuff really is poison to the ability to construct a coherent polity and really gives rise to a reactionary politics of citizen versus citizen. And so for a movement that wants to be about inclusion, about making this the watchword of what it means to be a liberal in America or Democrat in America, you need to bring some of these happier vibes.

And anecdotally talking to Democrats, they all compare this to early Obama, right, to 2008 Obama. But concrete example that you can give of this, the shift to has to do with again, the influences that are happening on the political scene right now. If 2016 into some extent, 2020, you saw a lot of the four-chan election or the eight-chan election.

This, an election and a Republican party and conservative movement that was actually fueled by these creepy message boards with a lot of angry and upset, usually young men, sharing kind of alarmingly racist memes. This year seems to be the TikTok election. And TikTok is a platform that is, unfortunately, all about happiness in good vibes. It's about people singing and dancing and sharing joy and common hairs.

These memes don't emerge from the dark corners of the internet, the way that the Pepe, the Frog, memes emerge in 2016, but from the light corners of the internet, where people are doing the Apple dance. And that is just a different energy that we're seeing on social media. And that has actually floated pretty heavily into the election season. I think that idea, Christine, that this is more of a TikTok election is actually really wise. These elections are often defined by emergent media forms.

I think that Obama was the candidate of early Facebook, sort of early social media, online organizing. Trump was the candidate of Twitter and algorithmic social media where you could really vault to the front of the American conversation by being extreme and leading to a highly conflictual engagement, I think, in a way Biden represented a sort of exhaustion and that Harris represents a sort of movement towards TikTok somehow, both her and Walls in very different ways, are incredibly memeable.

And it gets, I guess, to one of my half-baked theories of this, which is that putting even the platforms aside, I do think that there's a process by which the way that online ideologies move is that they often have a fair core point. But the dynamics of algorithmic platforms push things towards extremism, towards ingroup policing, towards a kind of purification, a looking for who is really committed and who isn't. I think JD Vance kind of represents this on the mega right right now.

And that Democrats went through that and it metabolized over time, that where they were online in 2020, which had, I think, very important things. I'm one of these people who used the wokeness backlash has gone too far, that there are very important insights in wokeness. But it also went too far in terms of speech policing, in terms of the general sort of extremism of it, the sort of movement of academic concepts into places where they didn't really fit.

And the fact that that wasn't a way you could talk to people who you needed their votes and they weren't in your movement. And something I just see in Harrison Walls is, and I guess this is getting what you said, Zach, there's just kind of metabolized. It's there, but it is softened. I mean, Kamala Harris is an important pick from an identity perspective. Kamala Harris does represent and actually think about a lot of these questions.

But in part because they are now embedded in the campaign, they're not talking like Twitter or X. They're talking like people who want to win Pennsylvania. And it's maybe wonder a little bit is the right just sort of behind in this life cycle. Maybe there's a couple years behind the emergence of like a MAGA ideology figuring out how to be an electoral force. Or maybe they have different dynamics. It's going to keep it more extreme and keep it in sort of YouTube comment section vibes.

But they feel like they're in different parts of the life cycle right now to me. Yeah. I think that's right. I think that's a really interesting insight. The idea of metabolization, I guess, the question is how long does it usually take? And I think the way that you are describing Harrison Wallace is having kind of finished that process and emerge as sort of a clearer vision of the party is something that the right hasn't yet achieved.

I mean, we talked a little earlier about how in some ways Trump sort of represents the classic bar stool libertarian view of the Republican Party and Vance with his illiberal, religious oriented ideals feels a little bit grafted onto the ticket. That graft in this sort of like lack of connection between the two still feels very evident.

And when you look at what's happening in the Republican Party and the conservative movement at large still, you can see that it's still working to figure out where this illiberal, liberal movement fits in with the rest of its platform. My question though is how long that is going to take and if in fact it is even possible for a movement that feels that extreme and kind of extremely opposed to even the most moderate normal Republicans to be actually digested.

Like their visions are pretty far out compared to the average American, but yes, even the average Republican. Yeah, I mean, one thing that working on this book on anti-democratic right wing politics convinced me of is that conservative political parties are not just good, but essential for a democracy to function.

A conservative political party serves as an organizing vehicle for people who have attachments to the way that society operates, to traditional social hierarchies, to gender norms, to the class interests of the wealthy, and to say, okay, we are going to be able to be part of

this system and we are going to be able to operate inside of it in a way that advance and defend elements of the status quo that we find valuable while trying to accommodate whatever kinds of liberal changes the electorate wants. And I think the problem with the current makeup of the Republican Party under Trump is that function of the conservative party has been repressed and sort of banished.

It's having difficulty adjusting to a democratic party that is at ease with itself because the Republican party is not at ease with itself and it hasn't been for quite some time.

There are many people inside of it who still want the Republican party to be what it used to be, which is the kind of conservative party that I was talking about a second ago, but under Trump and Vance who embody different kinds of reactionary conservatism, but as much as we talk about Trump as having barstable approaches to gender, his approach to race and immigration and inclusion on other spectrums is unbelievably reactionary.

I mean, much further to the right of a lot of European far right parties. And certainly when it comes to his attitude towards democracy, right, in which Vance shares. And that core conflict over the question of what is the Republican party for? Doesn't just speak to where it stands on the 2020 election, Latino immigration to the United States or where it stands on talking to young men about their interests. It speaks to what the party is in a deep and existential sense.

And the unease and the unhappiness that seems to radiate from a lot of this post liberal variant of the GOP that we're seeing is reflective of the fact that this issue remains unsettle. This identity question remains a source of deep internal conflict and one that has been put off in any kind of final resolution because the person of Donald Trump is so powerful that anyone who attempted to challenge him would be shot down.

The real question is whether this will continue without Trump's force of personality and what happens if he loses. Now if he wins, things are, I mean, well, well, then there's a whole set of different concerns that come into play.

But if we're just sort of operating under the assumption that there's going to have to be a conservative movement reckoning with some failures of Trumpism, that assumption that may or may not be true, it's very much an open question as to whether the Republican party can return to being a conservative party. I think that's a good place to end. So then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? And Christine, why don't we begin with you?

Sure. So three books that I've been reading recently, two are, I guess, related to this moment. And one is also related to this moment, but in a different way. So first, most recently I read Elrives Blackpill, which has actually been reviewed in the Times, it's about the transition from the sort of in-sale sphere to the alt-right. And it is a relicking read. It would almost be a beach read. How interesting it is if it weren't so scary.

A second book that I would recommend is What Are Children For on ambivalence and choice. And this is by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Weissman. And it addresses the question of why young people aren't having kids. And it sort of goes through the arguments in a philosophical sense, trying to sort of deeply engage with the worries that people have, whether metaphysical or material. And I actually just wrote a piece about this.

How they identify that this question of meeting is really necessary in decision-making. And then finally, and I think because this is a podcast, I'm assuming it's a safe space for a little bit of nerdery, Ezra. Absolutely. But one of the things that we've seen in the news recently is how the new right and JD Vance in particular, along with his mentor Peter Teal, have been influenced intensely by J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. I was a big Lord of the Rings fan and honestly, still am.

Me too. So I have just started rereading the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. And I would recommend it to others. Yeah, I refuse to give away Lord of the Rings. It's not happening. It's everybody gets to be influenced by it in their own way. That's right. We all love Tolkien. I'm not all of Tolkien. We all love Tolkien. I think it's got to be for everyone. America can unite around this. Zach, how about you? All right. So I've got three quite different ones.

The first one is Justice Gender in the Family by Susan Moller-Okin, which I think is a really classic and sort of underappreciated and popular discourse treatment of liberal feminism and account of what it means to be a liberal and a feminist, how liberalism should think about feminism and the question of gender inequality that fits very well into well, I mean, it's basically some of the things that the people we've been talking about are concerned about. All right.

It starts with an acknowledgement of gender inequality in the home and how that should be a central political problem. The second book is Cultural Backlash by Pippin' Orruss and Ron Engelhart. They're two political scientists.

And one thing that they do really nicely is use data from around the world to show how a particular kind of authoritarian populism depends very heavily on cultural themes and is really rooted in a sense of social change, cascading social changes, dislocating people from around the world and their use of data in particular. I find very, very helpful in trying to sort through the very, very, very different causal stories people tell.

It's not the rise of far-right movements, including ones that oriented and focus on gender. And the last one, I think, sort of speaks to our conversation at the very end, which is a book called Conservative Parties in the Birth of Democracy by Daniel Liblat, where he argues that European countries that had very different political arcs in terms of their

movement towards democracy being smooth or not in the 19th and early 20th century, defended very heavily on whether they had an institutionalized Conservative Party, one that could speak to the entrenched interests, like, say, the church and its vested commitments to traditional gender ideas that could smooth over fears about democracy, imperilating traditional social norms and the distribution of wealth.

So it really speaks to what Conservative Parties are for in a way that I find very helpful, even as it seems like to a lot of people, a Conservative Party that has such regressive views on things like gender could never be part of a democratic landscape. Zibat argues that that's not the case in a very revealing and useful way.

I'll note that we had Pippin Norris on the show to talk about cultural backlash, which is, I think, one of the most useful episodes we've done for understanding this kind of politics. We'll put a link in show notes. Christine Amba, Zach Beechham, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra. Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Clancho is produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, our senior engineer is Jeff Gell with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amman Sahuta.

Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, Audien Stragi, Barccostini Similuski and Shannon Basta. The executive producer of New York Times' opinion audio is in Maro Strasseur and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.