The Throes of Trumplandia

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Ana Marie Cox: An immigrant came in with a shirt off his back, wound up getting deported. All of his customers were like Trump supporters. And they were like, God, we didn’t realize this would happen. When you connect in your community, they may keep the person next door from getting deported.

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And this is What Could Go Right?, our weekly podcast where we try to look at the world through a lens of non outrage, non fear, non heat, and try to look at difficult subjects in a calmer way.

It is certainly true that in moments of intense, intense agitation, telling someone to calm down is not an effective way to engage a conversation. So if this particular conversation recorded at this particular time on the heels of a presidential election in the United States that went the way many people absolutely wanted and the way that many people absolutely feared may strike some people as, as that, the like, calm down in a moment of intense agitation. If so, we apologize in advance, but that’s the way we’re going to try to engage these conversations. And we try to do so more from a place of we’re all manifestly entitled to our own feelings and our own experience, but how we engage each other collectively and how we move forward collectively in a world and in a country where there are massive divisions and an intense amount of motion on all side is going to be one of the challenges of the time ahead.

How do we literally join together for common purposes and common futures, of which there are still strong areas, if not of agreement, then agreement about what problems we have and the need to collectively solve them. We’re going to talk to someone today who has been looking at politics for a very long time.

She is, I think, unabashedly of the left. So again, we’re going to try to engage people from all sides of the political spectrum. That’s where we are today. And to push ourselves and push each other to engage in a way that works and not in a way that does not. So who are we going to talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today, we are talking with Ana Marie Cox. As you said, she’s been a political commentator going on 30 years now. She’s the host of a podcast called Another Day, which you can support on Patreon, and she’s a contributing writer to The New Republic.

So, are you ready to go do a post election analysis, breakdown, feeling expresser?

Zachary Karabell: I suppose I am.

Emma Varvaloucas: All right, let’s go.

Zachary Karabell: Ana Marie Cox, it is a pleasure to be speaking with you today. Whether or not the conversation itself is pleasurable, I guess, remains to be seen. So we are recording this on Friday, November 8th. We had thought when we had scheduled this conversation, or at least we had anticipated, that there was a non negligible possibility that we would be talking about an as yet undetermined election and that we would be potentially discussing how that would all play itself out over the coming weeks and whether there would be confusion or violence or, you know, outrage and uproar.

And while I don’t think anyone is particularly surprised that Donald Trump won the election, any more than I don’t think I would have been surprised if Kamala Harris had won the election, there’s a little bit of surprise at the unequivocalness of that winning, and also the winning of the popular vote. I don’t think many of us had that in our betting pool, as well as lower turnout than 2020, which I think was also a little bit surprising, just generally, given that that unfolded during the pandemic.

So you’ve been around the proverbial and cliched political bloc, and have been taking a, I would say hard edged, occasionally wry, never sentimental, and always acute look at the political landscape for, I don’t know, 20 years, a while.

Ana Marie Cox: Yeah, it’s, it’s been actually like almost 30. I mean, I’ve been doing this since I was 25, so.

Zachary Karabell: So what do you think?

Ana Marie Cox: I believe I had some resilience built up for this because ever since we started looking at a fairly close election, I thought it was pretty important to gird myself and to make clear to as many people as possible that the work, this election is really the beginning of the work, right? No matter who wins.

I’m a huge Tim Walz fan. I’m sort of a Kamala Harris fan. I was happy to see her at the top of the ticket, but she would have been, we would have needed to move her on some issues no matter what. And so I was excited for some work, you know, and what this election has done, as emotionally devastating as it is, and it really is, I think it is less of a surprise than 2016, but it hurts more.

I am able to see a certain gift in it, which is that the work is much more clear, what the path, the, what will be needed from us. There is more clarity about that, and I think a larger number of people that will want to be involved. And I can’t think too much beyond that, to be honest, because we don’t know what the work is going to be exactly.

Emma Varvaloucas: Maybe you can enumerate a little bit what you mean about there being clarity now about what’s needed. What clarity do you feel like you have now that you didn’t prior?

Ana Marie Cox: Well, I guess the clarity is sort of a, whose side are you on issue? And also the, the feeling that there would have been some people, as what happened when Biden was elected, who took a sigh of relief and was like, all right, great. We did our job. Right?

And I now believe that that won’t happen, right? There may be exhaustion, but there won’t be complacency. There may be a sense of despair, but I think that despair can be countered with action and community. And I also think that in a good way, a lot of people are disillusioned with some of the institutions that helped create Trump. Mainstream media, traditional media, legacy media, whatever you want to call it, very much enabled this election, maybe even more than they did in 2016.

I think, I mean, he, he made it hard, but it was always framed in traditional media. The framing was always Trump is a felon and a fascist and has these unreasonable ideas, and Kamala Harris flip flopped on fracking. You know, like it was presented as though these were things that people could have a reasonable distinction, like that those were two things that would both equally weigh for some people.

But also there’s some ways that I think that there are issues that are deeper than that that I don’t know if we are as a country prepared to take on, which is, of course, the very deep seated misogyny and racism that enabled this lopsided, a decision, but I keep coming back to my hope that people will dive into the activism that happened in the Trump era, the first Trump era with, you know, the marches and the, since that we’re all in this together and, and the feeling that happened for a while, right?

Like there was jokey stuff and I didn’t really love like the welcome to resistance and I’m not a huge Never Trump fan, but like, there was a sense that there’s a, there is a group of people who are opposing this. And I’m, my, my belief is that that is the, that can be there again for people. It will have to be organized in a slightly different way, not perhaps as protest is the new brunch, but that resistance is the new way of existing. Like we’ve got to think about this kind of all the time. Right? And I also hope that people who have some privilege, some white people, you know, some straight people, whatnot, may have learned something in the Trump years that showed them and then the spaces in between that a lot of us that are really disappointed by this election are not going to be the heroes to come.

We’re going to have to enable the heroes who are already doing the work. There’s going to be some humility needed. I feel like I’m using the word hope a lot, but it hasn’t been disproven to me that people won’t engage in those actions.

Zachary Karabell: You know, I think I come at it from a different place. I did a piece this week, you know, just for people who don’t know, I would have voted for, you know, an ugly potted plant over Donald Trump.

And I do disagree with a lot of what you’ve characterized, or at least what a lot of the response is. I mean, I, you know, misogyny and racism and sexism have been an unfortunately evergreen part of not just American society, but human societies writ large. There’s certainly a spectrum of where that falls and what percentage of culture could be fairly aligned on the, you know, the worst side of that equation.

But I am particularly struck in, and was struck after 2017, at a particular inability of my cohort, of our cohort, to respectfully engage with a lot of other people who otherwise did vote for Donald Trump, you know, not happily and not engagedly and not supportively, largely in a binary sense of you get two choices, which we could talk about, I mean, is, is a challenge and potentially a problem in a country of 330 million people, you know, the degree to which everything is forced into a very, very particular binary template. It’s a system we have, but it’s still a problem.

And I am concerned still about the inability and, in times of unwillingness of a lot of people on the left to engage meaningfully on whoever the other is. I mean, there’s also one thing, I would like to hear your thoughts about this. It’s very striking about this election more than ever, separate from the gender divide is kind of the educational divide, which, you know, most of us talk to people who have four year college degrees. Most of us exist in an ecosystem of words and literature and ideas. And I think that’s all quite wonderful. But it’s also true statistically that that’s 35 percent of the country as opposed to 65%, which is not, I don’t know what to do about that. I mean, me, I don’t know what one does with that, but it certainly is a reality.

Anyway, I’m just wondering whether how you disagree with that, whatever, however you disagree with that.

Ana Marie Cox: Yeah, I have a, a real particular thought, which is the kind of activism and action and community that I’m talking about, I don’t think needs to be done across a political valence necessarily. I think it can be embedded in a community and a place where you don’t ask people what they’ve, what they did in the election, right?

This might sound kind of small bore, but I’m going to say it which is, there is a mutual aid society in Austin, where it’s called the Free Fridge and you just leave food. And you know, they don’t offer, you don’t have to show who you voted for, if you voted or if, what your income is or anything, right? It’s just like food that’s on someone’s, it’s like a free library, but it’s a fridge. Like it’s a private fridge on someone’s private property.

There is a, of low cost veterinarian clinic that you can support in Austin that again, no one shows their, no one shows their party ID when they walk in the door, right? Some of these, like the Free Fridge might have a little bit of a political valence.

There is a harm reduction community here in Austin. I actually serve on the board of The Sobering Center, which is a safe space for people to get sober, that police can take them, you know, rather than take them to jail. Again, no one asks for any kind of political ID. The people that founded it include prosecutors and defense attorneys and judges.

And all of that stuff is stuff that builds capacity in a community to become involved, further involved. And also the people I’ve met through those organizations, we don’t talk about politics. We talk about moving that organization. I answer the hotline at a addiction crisis place, and I will tell you right now, I have a strong suspicion that the guy that also works the phones same time as me does not vote the same way as I do. Really strong suspicion.

Come up like in this sort of on the edges, right? The day after the election, he asked me how I was doing, and I almost blew up on him because I knew what he was asking, right? And we had a really tense conversation, and then I said to him, how are the donations going? And we had a talk about the donations for that place.

Now, all of this, to me, are the places that people can build resilience. And again, in their communities, and they can connect with people. I also think that the guy I work with at the addiction hotline, probably, maybe has a college degree. Pretty sure. Probably not a very fancy one, you know? I know he’s not into literature, right?

We’ve talked about it. He likes to read, but he’s, he’s not going to be conversant with the stuff that I read, like in my, you know, when I, where I went to school, he might be interested. I don’t know. That’s just not what we talked about, but those are the places where you can make connections and be, as you used, conversant with people or to make connections with people.

And that’s the places where I feel like once I’m just going to use this guy at the hotline to make it a point. Which is that we had a conversation, he got real upset about trans stuff, pronouns once. You know, Gary, if somebody called the hotline and gave you their pronouns, would you hang up on them? And he was kind of forced to admit that would not be very charitable, right? That would not be a smart thing to do when someone’s in crisis, to get angry about them using pronouns that you may not think are necessary or agreeing with.

That’s what I want people to do. I don’t necessarily want people to, I mean, go out and march. I believe in marching, you know, I’m really, I’m a, you know, there’s going to be more political violence. There’s going to be mass deportations, but I also tell you what, the way that you fight those mass deportations is by creating a community again, that has the resilience and the capacity to do something because also, and we know this from various like anecdotes throughout the country, right? Like, like there’s that story that’s kind of famous about the community.

The guy who got deported, who’s the restaurant owner. Some story, I don’t remember where it was, somewhere in the Midwest, where there’s this guy who was an immigrant, came in with the shirt off his back, wound up getting deported. All of his customers were like Trump supporters. And they were like, God, we didn’t realize this would happen.

You know? Like, I think what you, what, when you connect in your community, then you develop people who may not get out in the street and protest mass deportations, but they may keep the person next door from getting deported. And I think those are the kinds of connections that eventually get you to a place where you have a stronger social safety net.

We can talk about politics and voting. That’s not the real work of the years to come.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s striking to me to hear you say all of this. I’m in agreement, but it’s in very striking contrast to the messaging and the tone that I see on social media and just like personal circles of people on the left. It’s very much so of an era that I thought we had left behind, which is like, if your family and friends voted in a certain way, you should cut them out, that this was a moral choice and like you made the wrong moral choice and like, I don’t want you in my personal life anymore.

Yeah, I’m just wondering your thoughts about that, like where that’s coming from, because to me, that’s coming from like the emotional response that you were talking about earlier about disappointment and despair.

Ana Marie Cox: It’s funny because you said I, I, I treat politics with not a lot of sentiment, but you know, in the time since, you know, I did Wonkette and was a more like hard edged person, I’ve entered recovery and I’ve done like just a lot of trauma work as they say. And I do think that it’s those experiences that have actually informed like the way that I’m thinking about this right now. And you know, you don’t tell someone who’s just been through something traumatic that they need to like think straighter, you know.

I mean, there’s going to be some time for like people feeling the fields. You know, like, I, I just, I can’t demand that people who are really scared and frightened right now immediately switch into analysis mode. Right? Like, I’m not going to like, I’m not going to scold people for doing whatever it is that feels like that, whatever comes up, you know, because I also don’t think that scolding those people or directing those people makes them feel any different.

In fact, it can make them feel worse. Like, what I’ve seen on social media is the interactions between the rational, let’s call them the rationalists, and like the feeling the feels people, the feeling the feels people don’t ever go, you know what, you’re right. Like, I am feeling too much, like, you know, they don’t, they never respond to like, you really need to think this through with, Oh, you know what? I’m, you’re right. I’m just overreacting.

So I kind of have not really, like, I’ve just been sort of on social media, like kind of being like, yeah, that really sucks.

Emma Varvaloucas: To your point of like, you shouldn’t tell someone that’s just gone through, gone through something traumatic to like, get over it, right? It’s also like, on, on the, on the side of like, people who are feeling that way, it’s not good to take action when you’re feeling that way either, right?

Ana Marie Cox: Completely agree. And I don’t know if, I mean, I don’t know how many people are actually going to leave the country. Statistically, people just don’t do that, right? I mean, maybe this is worse than any other election. I had a feeling like I wanted to leave Texas, honestly, but I’m telling myself I’m going to wait a year.

You know, like see what happens, see like what my connections are here, see if the, maybe the work I’m doing here is more important to me than whatever might happen if I leave. As far as like, I’m not going to talk to my family and stuff. Well, forever is a long time. Maybe it is a good idea to not talk to your Trump supporting family for a little while. Cause you know what, they might be fucking gloating and that would hurt too.

So again, like, I’m not going to tell anybody, like, I mean, if someone asked me personally, I might say, why don’t you not talk to them for a while, but let’s not make any decisions about telling them they can never be in your life, right? Like, don’t send the, like, you’re cut, you’re out of the will, but, you know, for your own emotional health, you might not, but yeah, it might be good not to talk to him because they might say some mean things. Like the guy, like the guy I work at the hotline with, honestly, was a little condescending and it kind of grind, it was not fun. It was not a cool thing. It was. It was not cool, right?

But we got to talking about something else. There’s something else we have in common, right? And that’s a lot of what I’m kind of trying to offer as a ways forward, which is to not hit directly head on, like what the disagreements are about, because neuroscience shows us that those wires, you know, the neurons that fire together, wire together, and to directly contradict someone’s deeply held belief will just cause those neurons to fire again, and will connect it even further. If you want to have a relationship with someone who disagrees with you about something, and you are hoping to change their mind, the relationship comes first, if it’s safe.

Like, if you’re a trans person, and your parents are, think you’re not really human, then maybe you don’t want to engage with them that much. You know, I mean, do what’s safe, but I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time. After 2016, my podcast, which had been kind of like a, Oh, let’s talk to both sides podcast turned into a really, for me, an investigation of what it takes to change somebody’s mind.

And there is a lot of science out there about it. And it is relationships first and politics second. That’s how de radicalization works. You know, and I, I, I guess the place I won’t go is I think that the Trump people, the people who supported Trump, I’ll put it that way, have rational policies in mind. Like, I think the policies are pretty hateful and I, I don’t think I want to discuss the policies with people and try to defend the lives of people I love, but I will walk someone’s dog and have, you know, like have that conversation and maybe politics will come up.

Zachary Karabell: I look at a lot of the rhetoric as particularly hateful.

I don’t look at a lot of the policies particularly hateful.

Ana Marie Cox: I think mass deportation is hateful. I’m sorry. Like mass deportation, rounding people up and putting people in camps is hateful.

Zachary Karabell: 12 million people were deported when Obama, when Clinton was president.

Ana Marie Cox: That was hateful.

Zachary Karabell: No, but to therefore make this a political divide rather than an American problem, 6 million people were deported under Obama, mostly in the first term.

So I would agree that one can absolutely say that mass deportations are a hateful policy. But you can’t say that mass deportations are a Republican policy.

Ana Marie Cox: Didn’t say that they were.

Zachary Karabell: I’m not saying you’re saying that. I’m not saying you’re saying that. I’m saying that there is a huge swath of that.

This has been an American set of policies really beginning in the 90s. It was not particularly true in the 80s. I mean, Reagan was definitely not favorable to immigration, but you didn’t have the same degree of militarization of the INS and the border control really until the mid 90s, which was very ratcheted up, particularly in Obama, uh, not Obama, but in Clinton’s second term.

Ana Marie Cox: To your point, like the conversations that I want to have with people, I’m not going to start with policy.

Zachary Karabell: Most of the contemporary debate around this creates it as a Democrat Republican divide. You know, this was a problem. 2018, there was, and we’ll never know if it would have happened, but there appeared to be a deal on the table about Trump gets funding for his wall and in return, DACA immigrants are given legal status or a pathway to legal status, which was not acceptable to the Democrats in Congress. Part of the challenge of that was under first Bush and then Obama, about 750, 800 miles of the border had been fortified, had been fortified with cinder blocks and barbed wire and, you know, weird fortifications. It wasn’t a big, beautiful wall and Mexico didn’t pay for it.

Trump’s rhetoric was hateful, but the building of a barrier was, you know, not a particularly strong departure from what had been in place before. And so the degree to which this becomes, you know, I like what you’re saying a lot about, you know, creating connection and community, because a lot of the policies that are objectionable to a lot of people are not so simply one side or the other, you know, cutting taxes for wealthy people is particularly one side or another.

For the most part, there is not a particularly strong anti abortion constituency within most of the Democratic Party. A small portion, but, you know, in general, that, that, that definitely does fall along party lines. All of this other stuff is presented as if it falls on party lines, but is more complicated.

And because Trump, you know, I mean, I did a piece at one point, I don’t remember whether it was 2018 or 2019, If Trump says it, does that mean it’s not true? You know, and there’s that, you know, the, the, the challenge of part of the challenge of polarization and this absolutely is true of the right about anybody, you know, is the minute you’ve assumed where the political identity lies, you, you basically stop listening.

And part of what you’re saying is listen first and then figure out where the political identities lie.

Ana Marie Cox: I think those are all true points about whether or not hateful policies have a specific party association, like both parties have had some pretty hateful parties, you know, hateful policy. And that’s why it’s funny. So I’m wearing a, you know, Tim Walz t shirt. I haven’t called myself a Democrat in a long time. Not because I’m like a third party person, you know, I’m just, it’s just, they haven’t, really represented, like, I don’t call myself a Cowboys fan, Dallas Cowboys fan. Like, they’re sort of my team because my dad roots for them, and I’m glad when they win because it makes my dad happy. But I don’t really consider myself, that’s not my identity. Let’s put it that way. Right?

And that’s, again, why I kind of go to, I mean, I can’t really, I think I’ve given up on speaking to how it is people should behave in Washington. You know, I don’t live there anymore. Thank God I don’t cover that kind of nitty gritty anymore. Because you know, politicians have, have failed us for the most part, in ways that have to do with what you’re talking about, like immigration debates and whatnot. I would be terrible as a legislator because I, I don’t know how to, how to make the deals and feel, feel good, feel good about myself. And I don’t know if I have the judgment to say that deal shouldn’t have been made and that deal should be made.

I do feel strongly about feeding the people who are hungry in my community. And I do also feel like, on some level, that leads to better politics on the, like, feeding up the chain, right? Because I do believe that the more people are not hungry, the more that they can participate in politics, right? I feel like the more people who know each other, the less they see that people are scary or other, right?

Like one of the big problems in this country is we’re so siloed, and that’s what you’re speaking to, a little bit, right? Like people who identify as progressive or liberal, not really knowing people who don’t. Because of the various identities I have, including like being a white lady, like I have pretty radical views on some things, but you know, the guy that I work with at the hotline will listen to me.

Like if I, if I don’t go in guns blazing, which, you know, I can do that. I like to do that sometimes. I also believe that talking through this stuff and why I’m happy to be in this podcast, is valuable to talk through it as people, you know, and not, I hate, I hate fucking cable news. Like I hate sitting around and having 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 seconds to like make your piece and to also all kinda like being converging on the same point.

Whether what, no matter what network you’re on, like, there’s always just this, like, we’re all going to essentially make the same point. It’s, it’s, at the end of the day. God, it sounds so cliche. I value listening. I value not, not putting party ID first. Because I, and it’s hopelessly romantic of me, I tend to believe that if people know someone, they will see them as human.

It’s if they don’t know somebody, if they don’t know a trans person, right? If they don’t know an immigrant. Like, If they don’t know the policy, how the policies will affect that person, that’s actually, putting that shit together is a piece that I think some people don’t do. They think the immigrants that they know will be safe.

News Clip: One of the historic bright spots out of Tuesday’s election is the fact for the first time in America’s history, someone who’s openly transgender will be a member of Congress. And young to boot, 34 year old Sarah McBride, who previously served two terms as a state senator in Delaware, won her seat with almost 60 percent of the vote.

This is on the heels of the Republican Party leaning into the demonization of trans folks, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on anti transgender ads this election cycle.

Zachary Karabell: I don’t think it’s cliche at all to be a romantic. And I think to some degree, having a degree of open hearted hope in the better angels of human nature is, is a good thing.

That, that doesn’t mean that one will not be disappointed, let down, depressed by the lack of equally open engaged response to that, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a constructive or essential place to begin to approach the world. I’m curious for those who are listening who may not know Ana Marie when she was doing Wonkette was kind of had this multi year, you know, early social media time of like buzziness, let’s call it, right?

Ana Marie Cox: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: And a lot of it was very hard edge and some of it was gossipy and a lot of it was, you know, wry and very media ish, right? Very…

Ana Marie Cox: Very insider, very insidery.

Zachary Karabell: Answer this as you will, just how do you look back on that now? I mean, presumably some of it was just fun. I, I, I sense that You’re in, in retrospect, the fun was outweighed by X, X being, I’m just curious as how you look at that now, given who you are now.

Ana Marie Cox: I mean, it was 20 years ago, which is crazy. It was an accurate reflection of who I was, although one thing that I’ve thought about a lot since, you know, like getting sober was 13 years ago. And my writing hasn’t changed. My writing, I can still be pretty, pretty wry, still be pretty, still, still carry a knife.

A thing that hasn’t changed is that Wonkette, however snarky or vicious I could be, a lot of that came from a place of idealism. You know, cynicism is only really possible if you believe that something better can exist, right? Cynicism and nihilism are very different. And I’ve never been a nihilist. I’ve often been a cynic.

That’s what I kind of carried forward from that time was a lot of my passion about make even making fun of like the press corps and whatnot. and making fun of politicians was centered around a belief that I still have, which is that don’t, these people are very human and very flawed and they work for you and anyone can do this.

This is, politics is not a sport for professionals, right? Like this is not, the only thing that differentiates a politician from you and me is the amount of money and time they’ve had to put into pursuing getting elected. But their ideas are not necessarily better. Their morals are not necessarily better. Their flaws are not necessarily fewer. And you get to play in this game as much as you want, right? I mean, to the degree that one can create access. I want democracy, right? I want more people to involve more. And I think that was one reason why Wonkette was the way it was, is I want to bring everybody down a notch.

And that’s still kind of how I feel about what I do. Although I guess if I’m going to be again, what I think is kind of corny, I’m also trying to raise up the people that maybe think they don’t count or don’t have a voice. And also I want to remind people who are terminally online, like, you know, like you have a lot of resource.

If you are a terminally online person, that means you probably have resources that you can put somewhere besides posting. Although, don’t get me wrong, I love to post. I am terminally online myself. I’ve been talking ever since the election. I’ve been talking about the fucking Free Fridge. That’s the simplest thing to do. And if you put like, I have put my Thanksgiving leftovers in that fridge for two years in a row and putting my Thanksgiving leftovers in that fridge means someone else doesn’t have to worry about eating that night. And that may mean that they can read the newspaper. Right? Like, and that may mean that they get registered to vote. That may mean, and who knows, if they register to vote for Republicans, that’s still not a loss for me. Exactly, right? Because that’s someone more who cares.

I know people can be real assholes and they can be racist and they can be sexist. And although even that, I mean, to sort of speak to what you were talking about earlier, like this can get me in trouble with some folks on the left. I don’t believe people are inherently racist or sexist or transphobic. I think that policies are racist or sexist or transphobic and people are mostly scared.

They can hate, people can hate, but all of that hate tends to come from, tends to come from being really scared and thinking there’s something that they don’t know. And I, I think that’s a lot of what happened this week.

Emma Varvaloucas: People might be scared, yes. And I think that people are also just self interested in the sense that, like, I do think there are a lot of people that voted this way because of inflation and they were just like fairly simple. I didn’t like how expensive things got under Biden. I would like something else. You know, and everything else is a non-issue to them.

Ana Marie Cox: I mean, there’s a little of a Nazi bar problem, right? Which is that if you say, you know, Oh, well, the Nazis are here, but I really like the beverage. I really like their menu. Like you’re tacitly approving them, the Nazis. And so I’m going to look at only the price of eggs is sure self interested, but also I think of limited self interest because the thing about fascism and anti democratic movements is they eventually come for everyone. But that’s like an argument that Harris and Walz had trouble making, I think, because it’s really hard to get across unless you can like make a very like long PowerPoint presentation about history.

But, you know, I think some people saw it, there was a crack in the door with that when it became clear, the, the curtain used, mixed my metaphors, but when the mask came off of the Republicans plan to pass like a, a fetal personhood act, and that would make IVF functionally illegal. Right? Like eventually, you know, bodily autonomy comes for you. It starts with abortion, then IVF, then birth control. It starts with illegal immigration, then it goes to illegal immigrants, then it goes to who’s really an American. I think voting against a fascist is self interested, but yes, people are very concerned about inflation.

Emma Varvaloucas: To your point, though, like, what do we think about the democratic strategy on this? Because they did choose, right, to make like, uh, you know, our democracy is at stake, a pretty main campaign message. And you’re right. They’re like, that is difficult to make a campaign message. Like it’s, it’s, it requires a much longer explanation than, Things are really expensive. And maybe you would like them to be cheaper and we’re going to sell you an option that it’s probably not going to end up, end up that way, but this is the option for something.

Ana Marie Cox: Yeah. And that’s also like, that’s really frustrating too, right? Because what the Republicans seem to have proved is you can just lie to people about how you’re going to make eggs cheaper. Like, that’s all you really have to do. Like, if you’re just going to insist that you have a plan, even though economists say that plan won’t work, it doesn’t matter. Right?

Like, so maybe the solution would have been to just lie about how they’re going to make eggs cheaper. I don’t know. But there’s a huge incumbency problem here too, right? Like they didn’t get cheaper under Biden. So I can’t believe they’ll ever get cheaper. I don’t know. Like, I mean, I’m not, I gave up on strategy talk.

I don’t know what they could have done. I thought she ran a really good campaign. I thought his campaign was really bad. And that is why I, I was somewhat surprised. Yeah. I mean, I knew it was going to be a tough, it’s, could go either way, but, you know, your closing message being about fucking Peanut the Squirrel seems like a poor way to end a campaign, right?

But that turned out to be a winning message, or something was a winning message. I don’t know if people should take on the template of the Trump campaign moving forward, but then again, we may not have a choice. The Trump campaign just may be the future.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, but there’s also a reality at that point where, at some degree, it’s unclear how many people really were undecided, you know, Even six weeks before the election.

So much of what went on then, I’m not sure particularly mattered in terms of which way things went, it might’ve mattered for turnout, but people don’t necessarily turn out in opposition to someone else, they often turn out for someone. So, you know, in many ways, a lot of what went on in the past five or six weeks may have just been essentially noise relative to what was already baked in.

There’s a much longer conversation about what does it mean to preemptively try to prevent something that you think might happen, right? So, you know, maybe Donald Trump has fascist inclinations, but there’s a long, there’s, there’s a ways to go between fascist inclinations and actual policy. And do we live in a country where the structures of that are sufficient?

Obviously, we will, we will find out they were certainly sufficient.

Ana Marie Cox: See, there’s a sort of like, I mean, I guess you’re not saying this, but like, the like, I guess we’ll find out is pretty scary.

Yeah, I don’t know. Like I, like I said, I, I, I am not putting my house up for sale. My dad, my dad lives in Georgia. He lives, he lived in Canada for a long time and really liked it. And he was kind of like, maybe, maybe that’s a good idea to go back, but we’re both not going to do it right away. See how bad things get.

I can’t, you know, I’m past the point where I’m going to have kids, but if I was a trans person, honestly, I’d, I’d get the fuck out. I would, I would go ahead. And if I had trans kids in Texas, I’d get the fuck out. I don’t think those are panicky moves.

Zachary Karabell: No, but I think that has a lot to do with Texas. I don’t think that has a lot to do with who’s in the White House.

Ana Marie Cox: I think that the, the sense of panic that was stoked by the Republicans, because that was their, that was another big, that wasn’t a closing argument. That was an argument. That was an argument they made. And, I think there has been a link there when you, when there is, then that’s why you were talking also about like, what’s like, Trump said things differently rather than just did things differently, right?

You’re talking about this deportation and stuff and how his basic policy, like basic policies aren’t that different, but the way he talks about them, it’s more hateful, but that matters, you know, like the way you talk about people matters in everyday situations and it sends a message about who’s, you know, what’s okay to say.

And if you, once you send a message about what’s okay to say, like, there’s sort of a, what’s okay to do. And that, you know, is a history of political violence. And I don’t know, like, I think it’s, it’s more, more Texas than other places. You could move to Minnesota, for instance, and probably be safe in Minnesota for a while. But like, I don’t know, long term planning.

I know people, I have friends who are looking at Portugal, looking at Uruguay. I actually do know someone who’s, who has a trans kid who’s not, who is in the process of leaving Texas. But yeah. Thank God for federalism. Boo! All federalists now.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, kind of, yeah.

You know, you kind of pointed to this earlier by saying that, like, the Trump template is a template now. And I do wonder about that. I certainly have a hope, maybe a naive hope that, you know, Trump is old. I’m in the camp that I do think that there’s going to be an election in four years and once Trump is gone, as a candidate, and I do think he will be gone, one way or another, the silver lining of a cult of personalities, once the personality is gone, the cult is gone.

And I do wonder, like, okay, I think the next four years, there are a lot of risks there, I’m not really sure what’s going to happen, some really bad things could happen, but it also could be the beginning of the end of politics defined by Trump.

Ana Marie Cox: I hope so. I mean, authoritarian governments can do a lot of damage, a lot of it economic. To come back from that will be a long process, even if it, if Trump himself only lasts four years, and if the organizing on the ground is good enough to get someone else different. I do worry about a plan for the Democrats to move more to the center because the Overton window has moved so much. It would be nice to have a clear distinction in the next election.

But I am going to try to stay centered in the here and now, and one thing at a time. I think you could be right. Historically, it is true, like strong men, like we’d have to turn in, I mean, there is like the North Korea option, right? Where like, we just get Don Jr. next. I do think that’s unlikely. But historically, it is true that you don’t get, you know, you know, cultural personality and strongman to not to last past that person.

And Trump is a very unhealthy 78, right? Or maybe those are all preservatives, all those. All those preservatives will indeed preserve him. Who knows? I don’t know. I think that we have to plan as though there will be authoritarian government and fight as though there will be. I think that we need to not make compromises in policy.

We, I mean, again, I’m no, I’m not a strategist anymore. If I was a successful strategist, I would, I’d have a much nicer house. You don’t have to be successful. That’s one thing we’ve learned. You don’t have to win campaigns and you can still make a lot of money. So maybe I should try out. But I saw pretty firsthand as all of us did that democratic compromises on abortion didn’t keep abortion legal.

My hope is that we don’t take that tactic with say trans rights or abortion again. That would be sad to me. And I want to fight that in the short term. I mean, I hope to be able to fight that in the short term because I don’t want to fight that all over again in four years. I mean, for now, what I have been telling people, and I’ll repeat it again in case people fast forward past the first part of the podcast, is if you are upset about what’s happening in the election today, volunteer at your local animal shelter, find a hotline to answer, find a food bank, like do stuff where politics is not going to be the first thing that you, that you know about somebody.

You know, I go to a church. The church is pretty liberal, but it’s, we don’t talk about that. Like, yeah. And you will, you will probably run about, run up against people that think differently than you, but you will have a basis of conversation that you can lean on to get through the hard conversations.

Thanksgiving coming up, you know, like read, read books about de radicalization. You know, I mean, I do think take care of yourself first is also a good thing in this time. I’ve been binging Battlestar Galactica.

Zachary Karabell: The new one or the old one?

Ana Marie Cox: Oh, the new one. It’s so good. Like, It is so, I just, I just re watched the miniseries and it’s like, I hadn’t forgotten how good it was, but it was just interesting to see how well it holds up.

Even the special effects, because they’re mostly practical, yes practical still looks pretty good on small screen.

Zachary Karabell: All right. Well, on that Battlestar Galactica note.

Ana Marie Cox: Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. That’s a Battlestar Galactica saying.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a Battlestar Galactica thing.

You see, that’s a good, that is a good note to actually end, you know, which is what human, what human, the particulars of human history change, but the emotions of human beings and the challenges do not change nearly as much. But the particulars are new. Obviously, a lot more we could talk about. I certainly struggle with this question of words versus actions, which may come as a surprise to some people, in that I’ve spent my life largely focused on words.

But I do think the, the bridge between words and actions is either more rickety, more elliptical or non existent than we think, even though I am in no way advocating for ugly, hateful words. I just think that the pathway between those and actions are confusing and people are fully capable of speaking with, as the good book says, you know, what is it? Silver tongue and evil heart?

Ana Marie Cox: Wise as serpents, kind as doves.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Ana Marie Cox: Yeah. Wise as serpents, speak as doves. Something like that. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Whatever. All these kind of phrases of you can speak well and act badly. But that is an ongoing conversation. Maybe we will return and have that conversation in the throes of Trumplandia next year.

I encourage everyone to listen to Ana Marie’s new podcast, to go back and look at Wonkette if you want to check out the.

Ana Marie Cox: I think the archives are broken, but yeah, try. Give it a shot.

Zachary Karabell: You can look up Wonkette. And I want to thank you for your time.

Ana Marie Cox: No, thank you. This was great. It was a lovely and reasoned conversation, also full of feels.

It’s a good one to have.

Emma Varvaloucas: We’ll take that. Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: So as I mentioned at the end, I am fascinated by, unresolved about this word action continuum. I think there’s a widespread assumption that words create the climate for action, and clearly we’re doing The Progress Network because we believe that ideas and how you talk about things create a climate that is in some sense path dependent, right?

So you begin with outrage and hate, it’s harder to end with reason and concord. So clearly, I’m not attempting to poo poo entirely that there’s like no connection between hateful language and hateful outcomes. I am of mixed feelings about all this. Yes, I would like to live in an ideal world where our language was respectful, the way that we dealt with people we disagree with was above board, where we recognized other people’s humanity and that the words we use followed from that essential belief.

I think that would be a better world. And it is something I certainly try to do. It is clearly not the world. And I don’t know that expecting it to be the world right now is particularly helpful. And I don’t know that judging how people articulate things when they do so really badly is necessarily a prelude to them acting really badly.

Even though I believe what I just said. And this is obviously all in response to the, the kind of the thesis out there. And I think some of what Ana Marie reflects is you start speaking that way sooner or later, you start behaving that way.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, I find that persuasive and I also find it persuasive that you kind of move the Overton window that way. Right?

And in that way you do slowly move what options are for policy in a particular direction. I agree with you that like just because someone says something that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to go in that direction in action. I mean, Coleman Hughes has a kind of interesting take on that where he’s like, Yes, it’s performative, but it’s also a negotiation tactic.

Like he starts out by saying something really crazy because then that’s where the negotiation starts and he can walk back less than he would have otherwise, right? So yes, I agree with you. Like it doesn’t necessarily mean that action is going to move that way. But I do think that there is a really serious effect of a candidate and president speaking in that way.

There is a remarkable difference between how people speak about people online versus like what they really would like go up and say to them on the street. Like, I still think that very much so exists. The amounts of people that are actually getting into conflict in real life over some of these cultural issues I think is very low.

Not that like hate crime doesn’t exist. I’m not saying that. Of course it exists. It just doesn’t match the rhetoric exactly. It’s not an excuse for it. Like I said, I still think it shouldn’t be like that Trump is, Trump shouldn’t be, anyone with that kind of responsibility shouldn’t be talking like that, you know.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to wake up in, you know, Germany 1939 or whatever the appropriate year is. And I do find those comparisons sometimes very ahistorical in a sense. Like, I just feel like it would be more, it would be more helpful to talk about like Maduro or Orban than it would be to talk about World War II era Germany.

Like, I just, I just don’t, I think that kind of comparison makes the real dangers much less serious, right? Like, like people don’t take them as seriously because it’s kind of like, wait, I don’t really think that Trump is going to like put people in concentration camps. I don’t. I just think there are other dangers and those dangers, I think, we would be much better off talking about rather than the Holocaust comparison.

So I just went on a rant.

Zachary Karabell: I think, no it’s a good rant. It’s a good rant. And I think if we could like have a moratorium on the Hitler comparisons.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: We would, we would be well served by that. We’re in our own particular moment and we should, we should focus on that and tone down the, what I find to be kind of hysterical rhetoric on the left as well, which I don’t think does any good. You know, it’s like one hysterical rhetoric bouncing off against the other does us very little good.

But we will have ample opportunity to debate this, discuss this, parse it, examine it over the next months and years, whether we want to or not. It’s going to be, it seems likely this will be part of the collective mix and something we’re going to have to grapple with.

And it is that people will respond to with great heat. You know, I used to say, I didn’t get involved. I said on one of our shows, I think I didn’t get involved as a professional, as a scholar or diplomat in the Middle East conflict, because I didn’t want to spend my entire life debating the Arab Israeli, Israel Palestine conflict, because it didn’t seem to me that anyone ever listened to anything.

And obviously that’s been, you know, far more true in the past couple of years, even than it was for the 30 years before, and it was pretty bad then. I feel like we’re entering some of the same realities in American political life where, you know, people line up with a kind of a moral and ideological and tribal absolutism that makes it increasingly difficult to have conversations that do not trigger someone in some extraordinarily heated fashion.

And if we try to do anything in the time ahead of us, I think one of the things we’re going to strive to do is not add to that heat. Respect where it’s coming from but not add to it. And that’s a challenge when the not adding to it itself is seen as picking a side.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, yeah. I find that in particular a very difficult stance when you’re speaking with people that talk about the results of the election as trauma.

I think that’s a really particular and intense word and I think that that applies to some people. I think there are some people that I would say, like, I do feel like if I were trans, like I would, I would be pretty, I would be freaked out and like, I would feel that this is traumatic, that like people hate me this much, but a lot of other people use that term, I think a little bit too generously.

And it is very hard when somebody is speaking that way to tell them like, I’m not sure that’s helpful right now.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Anyway, for those of you listening, we’re going to, this is obviously the beginning of a lot of conversations. We will not, I promise you, have endless conversations about politics, about Trump, about the Democrats, about the left, about this, about that, but we will certainly talk about these things because it will be an inescapable part of the conversations we have. But our goal over the next period of time is really to, as I said, try to find a way to talk about these things without the level of heat and reactivity.

And if some of you find that an insufficient response to an urgent moment and think that that’s somehow either being complicit in a problem or insufficiently attuned to all the problems, well, please express that. We’ll try to engage it. But I think from this stance, I disagree with that as the, as the opening way to deal with difference.

And one of the ways in which I think we all do, in fact, make progress has a lot to do with what Ana Marie said at the end of engaging people just in human relationships as people and asking about politics later, which I think is probably something we could all do more of and not less of.

So thank you all for listening. We will have another episode or two before we wrap it up for 2024. And please send us your comments, sign up for our newsletter. Thank you, Emma, for co-hosting. Thank you for the Podglomerate for producing, and thank you all as usual for listening.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone, and thank you, Zachary.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? is produced by The Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by The Podglomerate. 

To find out more about What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. 

Thanks for listening.