Chapo Trap House - 812 - Sweeney Odd feat. Osita Nwanevu (3/5/24)

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Contributing editor for the New Republic and columnist for The Guardian Osita Nwanevu returns to the show. We look at a new New Yorker piece on Joe Biden’s last campaign, and the president’s defiant refusal to change gears, adjust policies, or really do anything to address rather dismal polling ahead of the election. Then, switching to the republicans, we look at the increasingly weird and anti-social tact of American conservatism and ask: can the modern right be assimilated into American culture? Find Osita’s newsletter here: https://www.ositanwanevu.com/ And check out the Flaming Hydra collective (featuring a lot of great writers & friends of the show) here: https://flaminghydra.com/

I All I'm gonna do is give trouble, give trouble, give trouble, give trouble, give trouble, give trouble All right. Hello everybody. It's Monday, March 4th. We're back at it today. And it's kicked things off this week. today we are joined by contributing editor at the New Republic and columnist at The Guardian, Ossida Nuevo is back again. Ossida, welcome. Hey, good to be back. Ossida, I guess I just want to begin today

with the big news coming out of the Supreme Court. This morning, Supreme Court overturns Colorado decision removing Trump from the ballot. So, Trump will be on the ballot. Could you give us some context in this case? It was a unanimous decision, but it was split between liberal and conservative justices on the question of whether the state

or the federal government has the right to interpret the 14th Amendment. Am I getting that right? Yeah, I think that's basically right. So it was a non-no unanimous decision basically that Colorado did not have the right to do this, but there was a split between the conservative majority and the three liberals.

And actually, Amy Coney Barrett too, I think her concurrence kind of suggested she was mostly in agreement with liberals on the question of whether additionally, Congress is the only place where you can have somebody basically disqualify somebody under the 14th Amendment. The Liberals argued that all they were asked to do in this particular case was rule on whether or not Colorado had the right to do this.

The majority decision said additionally that Congress is the only venue in which you can adjudicate the question of disqualification under the 14th amendment. So, you know, I mean, I don't think that anybody was really surprised that the Colorado disqualification wouldn't go through. People raised the specter and liberal justice has agreed with this, of states kind of arbitrarily deciding disqualify people, kind of argument there is, look, states already kind of enforce election law. Basically, they rule on all kinds of other disqualification issues. Maybe it's not a stretch to say that on the question

of insurrection, they should always also have the power to disqualify people. But overall, the question of like, who has the power with the 14th Amendment to side? Nobody's really surprised by the fact that the Colorado thing didn't go through. I personally think that a lot of time and effort has been invested into the prospect, again, of getting rid of Trump by some kind of legal mechanism. I do, I disagree with people who say that what would have been anti-democratic to disqualify Trump.

I don't think that's true. At the same time, I do think it was wrong to invest as much hope as people have, not just in this particular Supreme Court case, but also all these other trials. I mean, the Supreme Court just delayed indefinitely the January 6th stuff. The other trials seem influx in terms of whether or not we're actually going to get rulings before the election in November. So the hope that I think a lot of liberals had that to get rulings before the election in November. So the hope that I think a lot of liberals had that the election would be shaped by Trump facing some kind of legal peril, maybe being disqualified or something, I think is kind of fizzling right now. I guess like yeah, like this. So unanimous unanimous ruling, Trump can stay on the ballot.

You know, I'm imagining someone someone threw their mother, she wrote coffee mug across the room today smashed against the wall, giving Just smash so many times and glued back together again, you know. It's the Japanese art of when you break something, you just sort of reseal it in gold and it becomes even more valuable. So, exactly that with your mother, she wrote coffee mug. But I guess just in light of the unanimous ruling, despite the split on who gets to interpret the 14th Amendment, and I'll just note that the courts conservatives decided that it states very much have the right to interpret the 14th Amendment in Shelby County versus Holder. But no surprises here. So I guess I see that like what I'm interested in is this broader question of, despite the fact that they're looking for legal fixes

to Trump and none have yet to present themselves, at least at the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court at the highest level has just,, has just basically cleared the decks for him to continue to run for president. So I guess I'm wondering, what's it gonna take for liberals broadly and the Democratic Party more specifically to get serious about what a problem the Supreme Court is? And I'm not even saying that this ruling was wrong,

but it is the major impediment to the things that they want, like getting rid of Trump or restoring voting rights or abortion rights to the nation. I have no idea. I wish I knew. I mean, you could say that 2000 should have been the point at which people realized the Supreme Court was not always going to work to the advantage of progressives, despite the history of things like Brown v. Board and so on.

The Supreme Court, people on the left know and as legal historians know, I think most of them at this point, has been a mostly reactionary force throughout most of American history. And there's a logic to that. I mean, to have a court case succeed, you need time, you need good lawyers, you need all of these resources that are inevitably going to accrue to the wealthiest people in American society. The Chorts in general are a kind of temperamentally conservative aristocratic institution. You're looking at the past.

And you're looking at kind of legalisms to decide what's right rather than any kind of formative framework. So for these reasons, I think it's been wrong to invest as much faith as people had in the courts. I don't know. I mean, I guess there's more and more of a slowly dawning awareness amongst liberals now that conservatives have stacked

the court, that it's now an institution that works mostly to the advantage of Republicans intentionally. That was the project of the conservative legal movement over the last several decades. I think that liberals get that. Whether they get this general point about courts in and of themselves being suspicious or not worthy of our trust, I think is an open question. Sam Moyn has been pushing this point for some time now. If it's not seeing courts as an institution fail utterly to do anything to disqualify or boot someone out who tried to overthrow the government if that's not enough to sort of erode faith and Legalism not really sure what's gonna do it. Well, it seems like you know with the specter of Trump, you know dictator day one

It seems like it's like liberals have taken up the mantle of defending the Constitution which used to be sort of the province of libertarians and the right wing. I saw you engage a little bit on this sort of question of, how good is the Constitution really? And would we be better off without it at this point? How did the cause of upholding the Constitution become sort of like the rallying cry for liberals and the Joe Biden administration Rather than a province of the right wing who are always trying to uphold, you know, property rights liberty things of that nature I think it goes way back I mean, I think I think you can think about Brown v. Board and Roe v. Wade and some of the things being real moments where liberals

Convince themselves that aside from engaging electoral politics Battles to win public opinion you could talk about a burger fell, gay marriage ruling. There have been these rulings that have convinced a lot of liberals that actually the courts are a venue for social change. And the constitution is old as it is, can be interpreted in ways that become vehicles for social change. And again, like, I think that we just kind of had a lucky streak. The courts have not functioned in this way for most of American history. So I think it goes way back. I mean, you think about the Bush administration, all the times people said, well, Bush is violating the Constitution and so on. And that may well have been true. But for whatever reason, people have

really invested in the idea that courts are a kind of work around, a kind of shortcut around actually doing politics. And to be fair, you know, somebody who breaks the law as often as Trump has flagrantly, you know, I almost don't blame people for saying, well, there has to be something in this toolbox that allows us to do something here. But there hasn't been so far. And, you know, I think that it's a way of avoiding politics and more specifically a way of avoiding

the difficult questions that are facing the Democratic Party in terms of the erosion of its electoral base, the erosion of stability to compete in parts of the country that are important to actually winning the electoral college and so on. It's a way to avoid the conversations about what's been going on in the post-industrial parts of the country, the Democrat Party has failed. If it's the case that courts can actually win these elections for us, or rather, if it's a case that courts can solve these problems for us, we don't have to think about that. We have this kind of patch or kind of plug in the bottom of the boat that'll keep us afloat for a little while longer before we have to actually address the hard questions they're facing us as a party. I'm sort of, uh, like in terms of the upcoming election, I'm sort of rooting for one possible outcome, which is that Joe Biden loses the popular vote, but wins the electoral college, because maybe in that circumstance, we could finally get rid of the fucking electoral college. finally get rid of the fucking electoral college. That's going to be the only way it's going to happen at this point.

It could well be, unfortunately. When people were talking about that like a year ago, more actively, Biden was not doing as poorly in the polls, I think. I think the loss we're going to see now is going to be both a popular vote and an electoral college loss if things keep trending in the direction that they're they're heading well I mean in light of that I'm wondering if you saw today's a big New Yorker article titled Joe Biden's last campaign by Evan Osnos gives gives a fairly fairly stark look inside the Biden White House and has as they're gearing up for November and Basically the the tenor of people are close to Biden and around him is that

the polls are wrong and their cool is a cucumber. They couldn't feel better about their chances going into November. I'm just wondering if you read that article and any reactions to it. Yeah, I did. I mean, for the last several months, I've sort of gotten glimpses here and there of like, you know, maybe this is just a deep bubble that the administration is in. Maybe they're not listening to people outside the White House. Maybe they're all kind of deluded on some level about the reality of the race as it stands right now. And the piece seems to be proof of that.

It paints a picture of a totally enclosed world where there's one paragraph that I posted about that kind of captures it all. Biden's chief of staff was talking to Oz News about the extent to which Biden actually receives criticism from outside voices. And he was like, yeah, totally. Biden listens to all kinds of people who criticize him. For instance, he would just go off the phone with Larry Summers recently. And when he's talking to Larry Summers, he's talking to Tom Frieden. He's talking to Mitch McConnell. So he's getting this wide range of like dissenting opinion. You know, so that in of itself I think indicates how enclosed things are.

And you know, so I actually, it's not out yet, but I recently wrote a review of Frank Foer's book on Biden that should be out in a nation soon. The Last Politician, which is kind of behind the scenes look at the first two years of Biden's administration and the picture that that Book page the picture that's painted in this piece are different in a sense that you really don't get the impression that Biden is engaging with progressives Or the progress of the party anymore at all Ron Clayton was kind of the liaison between

Democratic party progressives in the administration He's now no longer chief of staff and so if it's a case that the people he's really leading on now and looking to it for advice are kind of centrist or even Republicans, that could explain a lot of things about how the last six to eight months have gone. And also this polling question, virtually every poll from since the beginning of the year, has shown Trump a few points ahead. There was the New York

Times-Syandr poll from just a couple of days ago that said Trump is ahead by four or five points. Biden is now dead even with Trump, with women. He's lost a couple dozen points with non-white voters of color. It's been a very stark picture, and it's a picture that's not just in Apple, a problem with the methodology people have been trying to pick it apart. You see those kinds of patterns replicating across a lot of polls, both nationally and in the states. And there's no indication in the Osno's piece that the administration is taking any of this. Seriously, it quotes a bunch of people saying, well, all the polls are kind of wrong.

The polling industry doesn't know what it's doing anymore. Nobody picks up their phone. Nobody uses land lines. Excuse elderly because of landlines, you know, exactly I buy that well Yeah, the thing is like some it's definitely true that the business of polling has gotten a lot harder over the last Decade or so partially because people don't pick up landline phones anymore sure But pollsters have done a lot to try to adjust for that It's not the case the most polls are only landline based anymore. There's a mix of online stuff and cell phone stuff and so they're trying.

And also, if you look at the last several elections, David Ferris did this for Slate last week or maybe a week and a half ago. If you look at polls at this point in the year, in February, March of last several presidential elections. Each of them, with the exception of 2004, has ultimately indicated who the winner in November was going to be. They were off by a couple of points, and they're off.

They've actually understated the amount of support the Republican candidate has. So it's not the case that polls say nothing about where the election is. It is still March, there's still time for things to happen, but to dismiss everything out of hand and then to say as they have, like, well, actually, you should look at special election results because those are more indicative or you should look at primary results. Those are more indicative. None of that is true. The most the best picture going to get as imperfect as it is is the polling that's happening right now and the polling is not good, none of it is good. Yeah, but there's nothing in the Osno's piece

that suggests that they take what they're seeing seriously. Yeah, the arguments with the polls at this point are weird to me because, yeah, they always bring up that erroneously that it's only old people that are still answering their landlines Which in that case they should skew a lot better for Biden Biden's biggest problems are not with the oldest voters, but I mean They'll bring up 2022 a lot, which you know was the midterms are certainly surprised for some people

But the polling companies weren't for the most part off about the midterms were certainly surprised for some people, but the polling companies weren't, for the most part, off about the midterms. I mean, res music in places like that were, but that was a case of just columnist being wrong, not the polling companies. I was a point of member that Democrats did lose the House in 2022. Like they lost it by much less than people expected, but it was directionally correct to say Republicans were likely to take the House. And that's in an environment. Again, the difference between the midterms and general

elections is that the midterms bring people out who love to vote. People who love going out there and getting their stickers and whatever. They love waiting on mine. Exactly. Signing things. So Democrats in recent elections, both in midterms and special elections, have done actually kind of well on that basis. General elections, it's just the general pool of everybody. People who only vote in presidential elections.

People who are less frequent voters. And that's where you'd expect Democrats to see trouble. It's gonna be a different electorate. I just want another poll quote here from the New Yorker piece. you would expect Democrats to see trouble. It's going to be a different electorate. Another poll quote here from the New Yorker piece. This is speaking of Biden adviser Mike Donilon. And it said, Donilon's mild demeanor can be dismiss misleading. Like Biden, he has firm beliefs about politics, the public, the press, and the contrarian side. In 2020, he and his campaign team had to decide whether to emphasize the economy or the more abstract idea that Trump imperiled the essence of America. We bet on the latter, Donaldon said, even though our own pollsters told us that talking

about the soul of the nation was nutty. That experience fortified his belief that this year's campaign should center on what he calls the freedom agenda. By November, he predicted the focus will become overwhelmingly on democracy. I think the biggest images in people's minds are going to be of January 6th. And I just like, yeah, talk about people who've checked out. If they think that like November 2024, the biggest images in people's minds will be of January 6th and not, let's just say, October 7th and everything that happened after that. And then God only knows what images, new images will be created from now until November. But like, once again, coming back to this idea

that it's a, it's the Democrats, like it is, it is, it is not about just voting, this is about saving American democracy. And no, you don't have a choice to vote for anyone else. Yeah. I mean, the image it's going to be most burned into Americans minds, most voters minds is the last paycheck, I think. That's how it tends to work in elections. The flight to abstraction, I really don't have very much faith in. Their interpretation of the midterms was that the democracy message work, that people came out against Trump, I think there might have been some truth to that.

Again, because the electorate is fundamentally different with midterms. But here, I think that people are still angry about prices, I think people are still angry about interest rates, their material problems that people are having that the administration needs to speak to. Biden has not put forward anything resembling a second term agenda at all. Maybe he does that this week with the State of the Union, but it's my job to sort of know what the administration wants to do, what Biden wants to do, what legislation they want to put forward if they get re-elected. None of that work, none of that argument has really happened yet. And so to bank everything on January 6th, there's going to be ancient history, I think, for most voters. Instead of thinking actively about

what can we do materially to demonstrate that we care about the material problems people say that they're facing, say that we care about this foreign policy crisis that we are fomenting and actually exacerbating. You know, I think it's kind of delusional. I think one of the most significant things Biden could do to sort of demonstrate that he is with it

and on top of things and capable of Exercising leadership would be to shut down the war and Gaza, you know I think even people who are not necessarily considering themselves, you know advocates for Palestine the electorate Do you kind of look at that situation and say Biden is ineffectual? This is a foreign policy situation management United States does not have a handle on why is it happening? Why isn't Biden actually bringing things to a close or a settlement? That more than anything else, I think,

would be a turning point. But there's no indication in that. Osnoe's piece or anything else that he's actively willing to do that or consider that. Well, the indication came that they're at least worried about the branding came yesterday when Kamala Harris came out and called for quote an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. And given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate

ceasefire. For at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table. Saying that Hamas should agree to it, this is from the New York Times, saying Hamas should agree to a six by President Joe Biden for an agreement and came a day before she was to meet with a top Israeli official involved in war planning, Benny Gantz. Her tone echoed a sharper and more urgent tone coming from the White House and its frustration with Israel grows. Last month, the president called Israel's response to October 7th over the top. But I mean, I think it's there in the language here. It's just like they've adopted a more aggressive tone. And I think really what this is is that they're just sort of rebranding their humanitarian pause as a ceasefire now. That does seem to be substantive with what's happened. I mean, the position that Harris described in that speech

is not different from the position that the administration was describing last month. They used the word pause more often than now, they've been pressured into using the word ceasefire Of course what people want isn't for them to use the word ceasefights to actually make a ceasefire happen and and you know the leverage that the United States does have over Israel ought to be used In order to bring that about instead of sort of waiting for conditions There's just sort of settle on the ceasefire

Kind of magically. I don't know, I just, the position has not changed, but I don't know if people want to see optimism in the fact that they are now using the word ceasefire and sort of truce or pause, I guess they can, but materially nothing the administration is doing is actually shifted. Well, I mean, yeah, I guess they're doing air drops now,

but you know, just too much time. Yeah, it's not doing too much time talking about what that represents. But, you see, like, see, Biden has not really put forward a platform or an agenda for what his second term in office would be seeking to accomplish other than preventing Trump from ending democracy. But now, like, when you say that, like, you know, that there's been no real engagement with any material concerns or politics. I think people will, partisans of the Democratic Party or supporters of Joe Biden will say things like, well, were you just asleep during the infrastructure bill, the climate bill, the student loan debt forgiveness?

I mean, things like that, they're like, those are material concerns. Like, why aren't you happy? Like, what would you say? Like, why aren't those sort of agenda items, like, why aren't those connecting up to people's lived experience? Or is this the media or is this the nature of the bills itself? I mean, I think it's the nature of the bills themselves. I mean, whatever you think about the infrastructure bill, I mean, infrastructure is a kind of long term, infrastructure is a long term project. People aren't going to see in their own day to day lives,

in their paychecks, at their jobs necessarily. I mean, it's creating jobs in certain places, creating jobs in Michigan. But for the bulk of Americans, they're not going to see the immediate benefits of some of that stuff before the election, certainly, and maybe not for a few years. I mean, people, I think, want a president

who seems attentive to the fact that when they go to the grocery store, rightly or wrongly, they say to themselves, well, look, milk has gone up by this much. Bread has gone up by this much. It is harder for me to pay my immediate bills right now. Expiration of pandemic relief programs did not help on this question, right? So people want the president and Democrats

to put forward an agenda, not just, you know, doing the kind of structural things and making the kind of structural investments, industrial investments that they've been making over the past couple of years. They want to see immediate, you know, pay tech to paycheck month to month change in their financial conditions. Stuff like was kind of discussed when people were talking about the more expansive version of Build Back Better. You had things like childcare on the table. You had all kinds of social welfare in the conversation

that was sort of stripped out as a matter of congressional politics. If I were instructing Biden, advising Biden, if I were granted 15 seconds between Mitch McConnell and Tom Friedman to recommend him something, I would say, look, talk about that stuff again. Or it's sort of put forward another social welfare agenda that you want to say Democrats will accomplish in the next term. And I think there's going to be a reluctance to do that for a lot of reasons, partially,

because all that will ultimately falter on what the Democrats told Congress in the first place, yes, but also this filibuster question, which was not resolved, Biden did not really end up advocating for filibuster reform for more than just the Democratic reform agenda, the For the People Act and that kind of stuff. know, I guess there's a reluctance to promise things that Democrats kind of feel aren't going to get passed. I don't know, that's that's a hole that they created from the cells. But if if I were advising the campaign, two big things would be one and the war on Gaza now. And two, put forward an actual economic agenda that is not just

about moving a big piece of the economy or making big investments as important as that might be. It's about delivering immediate relief to people who say that their economic immediate financial situations are what they'd like them to be. And not just talking up to, like the idea that well, on the basis of all these metrics, the economy is booming right now. Might that be true as a matter of looking at different statistics? Yes, but the voters are telling you over and over and over again, they aren't feeling that reality. And I don't think it's more politics to tell them that they're just deluded, that this isn't real. Trump is not going to say that this is deluded. He's going to say that, yeah, you're absolutely right. You think

suck right now, and I'm going to go ahead and and fix them and this guy telling you that you're not suffering is Is a jackass? I don't know. I feel like that will probably win that that argument Well, I see the seeing this other probably not gonna end the war in Gaza or tell people that their concerns are valid We're stuck with you know like a Candidate who's you know trailing Trump and LaPaule's probably like 60% of his own voters think he's too old to be president or to be an effective president. And then like the question comes up again, can the Democratic Party replace him? And then the answer is always, who are they going to replace him with? And the one I've seen

recently calls into question the most recent example of Lyndon Johnson not seeking a second term because of the Vietnam War. And they're saying the point they made the people offenders of Biden will make is that Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon. Do you see any problems with that, at least in terms of the idea of why it's impossible to replace Biden at this point? I mean, the more relevant thing would be like if you look at the polling that people have done for Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsome or Kamala Harris or any of the people who seemed like they would be, the most likely replacements, they don't necessarily do better than Biden right now, but I think that's functionally a matter of name recognition.

Like if you had an actual campaign and the people were out in front of voters, my sense is that the support that they have right now might be a floor and they had room to grow, maybe. It doesn't seem to me like people are going to get more comfortable with Biden's age as we get closer to the election. It doesn't seem like they're going

to get more comfortable with his capacity to lead. On that score is we get closer to the election. So maybe in that sense, it would make some strategic sense to think about moving to another candidate. I think the real question is how? As a recline, put out this idea, maybe like a week, week and a half ago, about doing a brokerage convention, just sort of deciding it at the DNC,

I could get messy. I don't know, it's all, it would be hard for them to do worse than they're doing right now. That's the bottom line for me. So in that sense, they should feel free to experiment or, you know, throw someone else out there. I just, I think it would be hard for them to be in a worse position than Biden is right now. So maybe they might as well on that basis,

consider somebody else. But the reality is that, you know, given what we see in that Osnos piece and what we've seen elsewhere, the administration is so insulated from taking the polls seriously, from voter sentiment that it doesn't seem likely that we're actually going to see replacement happen. There's somebody who is quoted on this question, I think in New York Times recently, who's literally said the word shut up. This question shut up, literally said shut up. Like this is not a real concern. Biden's with it. He's not you know, he doesn't have dementia. He's he's

Gonna inspire confidence as people see him get out there to one shut up and don't talk about this anymore Um, because he's the guy So, you know, if that's the attitude then I I don't even know how much sense it makes to to speculate about a replacement It doesn't seem like it's It's gonna happen. I've seen some kind of medical emergency, which is also plausible given Biden's age, I have to say. That's one thing I've thought about too, actually. I mean, image matters a lot. If Biden were to fall down or something or wind up with a little bandage on his head, not even be seriously injured in any way, but just have some kind of mishap that reminds people damn. This is a really old guy

That could be it that could be the election. I mean we remember when Bernie Sanders had the Bandage right during the primary last day. Yeah, it was all this sort of like well look at how he looks He looks kind of haggard. He looks kind of I don't know. I don't know if he's still got it Down before so I know if you still got it. If something like that would have happened about it. Well, Brian's never fallen down before, so let's just let him maintain that until November. Right.

Yeah, I don't know. I just think that could end up mattering, really. I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know. I just think the 1968 example is interesting because in that election, the guy who would have beat Nixon was literally assassinated.

And Hubert Humphrey was very close in the popular vote in that election and also Lyndon Johnson would have lost even harder than he did and he didn't even lose that bad. Yeah Dean Phillips gotta watch his back on that score What has Richard Nixon ever done for me? Medicare No, that was Humphrey's idea What has Richard Nixon ever done for me? Uh, Medicare. No, that was Humphrey's idea. But Nixon, Nixon. What, a bomb? A nuclear bomb?

No, that was Humphrey's idea to stop testing the bomb. But Nixon. Now, what has Richard Nixon ever done for me? Oh, let's see. Working people, I'm a worker. Nixon never do anything. Humphrey and the Democrats gave us Social Security. What Nixon? What's funny? It must have been something Nixon's done. All right, well, to move on from the Democrat party and the Democratic party, sorry, that's to be all Fox news here,

but to move on from their woes and possible defeat in 2024, to talk about the other side of the equation, the Republicans and the conservative movement. And, Ossiba, like, you know, as someone who follows this and we follow it as well, the success of Trump and his, I guess, MAGA conservative movement has like, you know, expanded the Republican Party Coalition beyond some of their more traditional areas, sort of zones of support. We're seeing, you know, Trump gaining heavily among Latino voters.

But it's sort of like a victim, sort of a victim of their own success here as well. Because like, as it, it successes and setbacks politically, have engendered a kind of, I don't know, like a modern right wing conservative movement that is getting weirder by the day. And this is a question that you posed, I think, you know, like, humorously, but I think it's one seriously worth seriously considering is that can the modern conservative movement assimilate into American culture? This is a question that we've been pondering ourselves as they begin to turn against the NFL, beer, most kinds of food, pop music, and now babes. Taylor Swift, Sydney Sweeney. It's just, where do you, where does this come from and what do you make of it?

Yeah, I mean, this isn't something I've thought about a lot, more than I've actually written about it because I think it's so unwieldy and kind of strange as a topic, I don't really know what to make of it yet myself. To the extent that I have a touch upon this, I think a piece that I did a few years ago, and it was actually one of the last times I was on here about Sarabha Mahri and David French, the debate that they had over drag queens. For people who don't know or don't remember, Sarabha Mahri, this conservative writer logs on to Facebook or something one day, he sees an advertisement for a drag queen story out, or happening in California, completely across the country from where he lives.

And he says, this is demonic. We now have to get rid of liberal democracy. And he has a debate with David French on the score. And people haven't followed this or commented on it in the way that I think they should. But since then, Amari's backed away slowly from the whole drag queen thing. He's now one of these guys saying Actually republicans are too focused on wokeness now. We need to be talking about manufacturing It's very much like the hot dog meme thing like you did

You are part you are part of the main reason why people think that about rebrand himself as like a new deal democrat kind of he's doing this kind of populist Conservatism thing it's kind of we're republicans, but we believe in using the government to help the working class, supposedly, thing. That's his shtick now. But in that original, that iteration of Amare, and that where you saw people like Agent Vremuel come out, and people who were expressing the old grievances of social conservatism in these new ways, like saying actually America should be an interglist Catholic nation, or we should use the government in ways

that conservatives had not previously contemplated. People like David French were kind of, you know, it was supposed to be the good, righteous, or defending liberalism people. The fact that people said things were demonic seemed to be like a first glimpse, or one of the first glimpses of the turn we're seeing, where things have gotten more and more unhinged, people are getting more and more troubled and disturbed by increasingly normal and unoffensive things.

I don't know, I think about it in a few different ways. First way I think about it is that, I think that one of the things that characterizes the rights now, the Catholic interglace aside, is that there's been this kind of secularization of social conservative politics. I don't want to overstate that because evangelicals are still powerful,

they're still shaping the abortion bait, obviously, and abortion policy right now. But when I think about when I was first learning about politics, and I was listening to the gay marriage debate, for instance, back in the mid-2000s, the argument against gay marriage was always, this is a contravention of biblical principle. The United States is a Christian society,

and on that basis, we have to reject this heathenism, right? The leading people you'd hear from were like Pat Robinson and the focus on the family people and the family research council people You know the grand family. It was all tethered to the kind of moral majority Politics that came out under Reagan. It feels to me now that even when you hear conservatives talking about why they hate transgender identity, why they hate this or that cultural turn, the appeals are more often to evolutionary psychology, logic, facts, reason, this kind of thing. You're hearing from people like Jordan Peterson, who is not a conventional, he's like a psychoanalyst. Well, I mean, ask him if he believes in God and get like a psychoanalyst, right? Well, I mean, ask him if he believes in God and get like a half an hour answer.

Exactly. You heard from a brief moment from people like Marley Unopolis who wouldn't have been within, you know, 500 yards of conservative politics in the mid-2000s. Or in schools. Or in schools. And I've tried to make sense of this because I think one of the things that might have happened there was, in the 2000s, conservatives were so, they felt so defeated by new atheism, the Christopher Hitchenses, the Richard Dawkinses. And that kind of...

That's really sad if you feel like you got bodied by that old shot. It seems like that's what happened though because the the mode of discourse we hear from Ben Shapiro is exactly the kind of mode of argument you would hear from Hitchens or Dawkins and the kind of, well if you just sort of think about it logically, and we're not appealing to the Bible, we're appealing to basic reason. That mode of discourse I think has been appropriated by the right, and it helps that along those same figures now, like Richard Dawkins, are now on the anti-woke space. So there's been this confluence there. The other thing I think about too is the institutional collapse of the Republican Party and the conservative think tank world.

I think most of the people's interpretation of what happened under Trump was. Trump comes in as this extraneous figure, he wins the primary, he wins the presidency, and then he sort of sweeps through Republican institutions and installs his people, and that represents a real shift in Republican policymaking and thinking, where the Republican Party is now Trumpist. The Trumpist transformed Republican Party. What I think actually happened is that he wins the primary, he wins the election, and he brings his people in, but he's able to bring his people in because Republican establishment understands

that Trump can be utilized and deployed to advance conventional Republican aims. So the biggest accomplishment of the Trump term is a tax cut, right? This big, long-awaited transformation of American trade is gonna fix NAFTA, doesn't happen. He deregulates an exactly the way you would expect a Republican president to.

His convention speech in 2020, he spends a lot of it talking about school vouchers, right? He's a conventional Republican in all of these different ways. And I think the fact that the Republicans, the establishment understood that they could capture him, allowed them to say, look, even if we bring in all of these weirdos, we'll let it happen because, substantively, whatever they tweet about, whatever they post about, the actual agenda is going to stay functionally the same. So that's allowed for

the entry of the Richard Hennanias and all these kind of weirdos, he might have seen more resistance to how there had been a real understanding within the Republican establishment or a real sense within the Republican establishment, these people were actually threats to your actual material agenda. They haven't been. There are all these just hangers on in far-right people and racists and weirdos and fortune-takers who glommed on to Trump and rode him into positions of influence in the discourse, if not in congressional offices. I think a lot of these people do work for Republicans in Congress now because Republican establishment said, okay, we can let these people in, we can deal with them because they're

not going to cause too much trouble in terms of the Republican policy agenda. The third thing I think about is what I've called the right to be cool question. Yes I mean, you see this one Yeah, I really want to get into this idea because it's just like we talked about a lot on the show is like the disparity between the political and cultural power of the right wing and while their political power is delivering all the same old Republican stuff like deregulation tax cuts or whatever These there seems to be more of a demand now to use the power of the government to enforce a kind of cultural parody, which you describe as sort of a constitutional right to be considered

cool. Or to say Ben Shapiro is as cool as, I don't know, Taylor Swift or something like that. Yeah. So, I mean, through government or through just social norms and bullying. I mean, so the idea that it's not just enough to have the right to speak freely or to think freely. Affirmatively, you have to respect us as equals, or is even as cultural superior. So you have to legitimize the fact

that we now think that football is too woke. And we don't think Taylor Swift is attractive. We don't think Sweden is attractive. You have to affirm our own grievances, neuroneuroses. And I think that this is also kind of tethered in some way to the material Republican agenda. This is all just kind of vamping again. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it myself.

But the way I think about it is most of the anxiety that we're seeing on the right now, we just talked about Srabamari about contemporary capitalism. This idea that the Rehoboikin Party is now going to be a working class party, you know, if you listen to people like Josh Hawley and JD Vance and Marco Rubio, because it's going to take manufacturing seriously and we're going gonna deliver benefits to workers. Most of that stuff, first of all, is not real on a policy basis. They're not proposing much, they would materially affect and improve the lives of working people in this country.

But two, I think a lot of the angst about capitalism is motivated by the sense that liberals have benefited culturally from the bargain conservatives originally made mid-century, where they said, we're going to do traditional conservatism and we're going to do unrestricted market capitalism. And those two things are going to go together indefinitely. Whereas in reality, corporations that want to make money in the cultural space or that have to sort of make cultural appeals to people

to advertise their products are going to try to be as broadly appealing to as many Americans as possible. And majority of Americans are not conservatives. A majority of Americans, you know, like Martin Luther King, there's been this campaign against Martin Luther King and Charlie Kirk has started up in the last couple of years. Oh yeah, I'm thrilled to see how popular this is going to be. Right. Most Americans, you know, are not hugely, hugely, hugely offended by the idea of recreational sex.

Most Americans like football. I mean, most Americans don't have- Most Americans don't have pop music and babes. I thought like this is the universal thing about American culture that I thought really both sides could appreciate, but apparently not. I mean like you're saying if you think Sydney Sweeney is attractive, you are gay. And I saw one guy today said if you think Sydney Sweeney is attractive, you're spiritually African. When it's just like, I know this seems like the new rebranded right wing, but it really is all of their same the rosies about race and sex, but it really is all of their same therosis about race and sex, but gussied up now in like kind of as you said, a secular sort of modern academic

context. I don't know what you would call it. Richard Hania is a good example of this. Right. What I was going to say is that so when they realized that actually what was going to happen in the corporate world is that we're going to see gay CEOs and CEOs and executives of color and you would see advertisements that are about multicultural society and you'd see corporations making completely meaningless statements about George Floyd They were like well, well, hell we'll just throw out or we'll we'll make noise about throwing about capitalism Right. We'll make noise about standing against corporations if corporations corporations are going to be woke, if they're going to appeal to liberal culture, we're going to sort of renegotiate or rethink the arrangement that we made. There are people on the outside of actual Republican power politics, outside of Congress, outside of the think tanks, people who are just sort of ordinary

people out there who really, really, I think are invested in the idea of, yeah, we need to use power of government to completely reshape this arrangement, bring corporations into alignment with our social values. People who work in Republican politics, Republican politicians, are not really about this. They don't want to mess up what they've got with going with Comcast. They don't want to mess up what they've got going with the firms that give them money. They don't want to actually make material change. They'll make noise about DEI and corporations and all of this. In actual fact, they're not going to do anything. But the thing that they offer to the social conservatives who are really upset is, well,

we are going to try to carve out space for you in liberal culture. We're not going to actually change corporate arrangements. We're not going to actually change corporate arrangements. We're not going to cost these companies money. What we are going to try to bully people and to take them, social conservatives more seriously is like a cultural matter. We're going to try to create safe spaces for you and the culture in the lieu of making any kind of material changes to the arrangements that are shaping Republican politics. And so that's where I think the right to be a cool kind of functions. It's a fig leaf in the substitution for doing what a lot of social conservatives actually want,

which is to bring these firms that are actually very close to the Republican Party, in spite of the fact that they make statements about George Floyd under the heel and subject to actual policy changes. The big exception to that is tech. You have all of this policy conversation about content moderation and censorship

of certain things on tech and the extent to which tech is ruining children and so on. And I think tech is the exception partially because it is not as, first of all, it's the relationship with the Republican Party is not built up for as long a period of time as the television and the radio and the conventional media industries. I think the actual base of people who are working with these companies is not as traditionally conservative in many cases.

The Peter Teals and Elon Musk get all the attention, but the people who are actually doing the work at these companies are not necessarily for the big social conservative project in many cases, or at least they're more libertarian than the people who want to sort of ban recreational sex are. So I think that there are reasons why tech has been singled out as kind of the scapegoat and the one industry that they're allowed to go after. out is kind of the scapegoat and the one industry that they're allowed to go after. Every other big piece of culture is not really finding themselves subject to very much. I mean, Ron DeSantis tried to go against Disney in Florida in this kind of performative way, did not get, I think, that much backup from the institutional vlogging party.

I don't know how serious that effort actually was. A Disney doesn't seem to have been materially threatened by it in any way. So, you know, I think that the right to be cool is kind of functioning as a substitute for when a lot of social conservatives in this weird space actually want to see, which is governments manning them a girlfriend and cracking down on any company that sort of makes fun of conservatives in any way. If I could return to a guy who's a constitutional right to be cool, who's being viciously trampled on literally every day, you brought up Richard Hanna-Barbera as like, I think he's a good example of this phenomenon you're talking about,

of like the secularization of all of the old right-wing obsessions. And practically, what does that mean? Well, here's a guy who came out of online forums of basically race IQ jargon and racial supremacy and a political agenda that basically boils down to stupid people as I regard them don't deserve civil or human rights. I think that's basically the point of the IQ debate. But now he's rebranded himself as like, oh, I'm a liberal Democrat now. I support the Democratic debate. But now he's rebranded himself as like, oh, I'm a liberal Democrat now. I support the Democratic Party. I'm arguing against race and IQ.

But essentially he still believes all the same things he used to do. So how does this trick work in your mind? And what are some of the other sort of knock on effects of secularizing the rights long time of session with race, sex, and things of that nature? I mean, I think that when you divorce social conservative grievances, the kind of innate

I don't trust or like people who are different from me, that kind of impulse, when you dislodge it from something like Christianity in the Bible, and those impulses are just sort of allowed to run wild, they evolve in all kinds of weird and strange directions. And that's what I kind of think is happening. There's no structure to it anymore. You have people in the conservative movement who are talking about the kind of bronzied, purged people, right, who are not about traditional Christianity in a certain sense, but they sort of do this mash-up of like, oh, you know, like, well, there's certain things about paganism that were cool, and there are certain things about Catholicism that are cool, and there are certain things about even Islam. We can sort of like leverage and sort of use to make a point about the role women have. Like, it's kind of like eclectic, wild, mismatch of different eras where people are planning for-

Any important storm when it comes to taking away the rights to women. Any important storm, like we want to be Robin-Legionaires and we also want the 50s housewife and we also want to stay on the computer and have anime girlfriends. Like it's all kind of unmoored, but I think still fundamentally driven by the same grievances

to a certain respect. I don't know. I mean, I feel like the other thing about this crowd obviously is that they're younger. So all of this is kind of mixed in with this kind of 20 certain thing, 30 something angst about your place in the world and like how many dates you're going on. Say what you will about Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson's politics were not informed by his inability to get a Tinder date, right? Richard Hanania.

He had a wife. Right, yeah, Richard Hanania, you know, that, the sexual politics there, I think, is being driven substantially by the sense that, like, recreational sex is bad because they're not having recreational sex with me right now. So I think that that's kind of how I understand him. Like it's when you've sort of uprooted the thing

that made all of this kind of congeal and gave everybody the same script, which was sort of the moral majority Christian evangelicalism. And you just sort of let these kind of like what Lionel Trillion called weird Irritable or irritable mental gestures run wild things that weird really quickly and you have people saying like Sydney Sunni and Taylor Swift aren't attractive and actually Your your homosexual if you think they're attractive it gets it gets it gets odd and strange very quickly There's also like a very strong like fissure between more traditionally Christian conservative elements of the Republican Party and this new more like

alienated men faction they have a lot of dust-ups online that are kind of like out of view of most You know conservative watchers, but it usually boils down to like the traditionally Christian conservative guys saying like if you're complaining about like not getting laid or like not finding a wife or that all women are bad now, like you need to be a good man basically. And the newer form of conservatives going all the good women died. There are none left.

There are no more good women left, fellas. What happened to Gary Cooper? Yeah. What happened to Gary Cooper exactly? Yeah, along those lines, I remember when the Iowa caucus was going on, there was a Times article about how like a new strong contingent among Trump voters were people who were considered themselves Christian but didn't go to church. So like, I think there's another, there's another thing going on here, which is just, it's not secular, but it's sort of like Jesus without the church, Jesus without any connection to a religious community and like this, this personal relationship just really becoming you know like a real trist It's just you and Jesus. That's it. No other no other believer was our community

But yeah, like I don't know like I don't know where I'm going with that But it's just like another another weird development of right wing politics in this country. Yeah I mean I kind of feel like So if you look at the numbers church attendance for white working class Americans has gone down a lot over the last couple of decades, which isn't to say that they're like all irreligious or something, but like you were talking about, like the way that they experience religion is very much not in the way that evangelical Republicans have wanted people to experience religion.

And maybe that goes some way towards explaining why they were so willing to embrace somebody like Trump in the first place who was divorced and was in a Playboy video or two and so on. Like, I think part of Trump's appeal had to have been that he was not part of the same mold when it came to these social questions. Like, yes, he would do, he'd go through the motions about, you know,

oh, the Bible is my favorite book, actually, and, oh, I've always been pro-life, whatever. You'd go through the motions of saying that stuff. But on a certain level, everybody who backed him knew that he didn't believe it and tried to rationalize it in different ways. For people who were actually evangelical, it was, we'll hold our nose because he's going to actually be the person who gets us the court, and we can, it was, we'll hold our nose because he's going to actually be the person who gets us the court and we can get the court, we can get rid of Warby Wade. And so we'll just sort of ride with him. But for people

who are outside of that camp, I think I just plain didn't care even normatively that he was lying. This guy is a kind of a person who doesn't have these same kinds of social conservative hang-ups. He'll pretend to, but he doesn't have these same kinds of social conservative hangups, he'll pretend to, but he doesn't. And, you know, that's more relatable to me than a Mitt Romney was, you know, on that level. Like this is somebody who is messed up in some fundamental way. And I can't rule somebody who's messed up. I mean, I think, like, you know, his hypocrisy or his inauthenticity is part of his authenticity because, you know, aren't we all hypocrites we all hypocrites? Aren't we all full of shit in a certain way? But also, he does represent

an authentic American religiosity, like we see, for instance, in a figure like Lauren Boebert, who is a hard-right-wing evangelical Christian, but lives the life of someone who is wiling out of control, party girl. And's been some fun stuff with with Boebert this week Or Matt Schlepp who everybody's well. Yeah, it's sort of like, you know to to to espouse, you know Right when Christianity but to be in your own personal life totally unchurched and it's like almost like I was with Boebert It's like if you espouse the right values like that's the permission you give yourself to like go nuts and be partying every night Yeah, yeah, I mean Trump in that respect. I don't think Trump parties as much as No, which is kind of sad

I mean if you have that much money and you you're kind of able to do it whatever you want and you're never gonna be prosecuted for trying to Overthrow the government you deserve, you know a Chance to let loose at Mar-a-Lago sometime. But I don't think it does. Yeah, he's like Andy Cohen. He should be allowed to do blow with his favorite housewives. Yeah, it's not the same since Epstein left, unfortunately, for him. Yeah, I'd say the plug is dried up. All right, Osuna, we'll leave it there for today. I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us today. If people would like to check out some more of your work, where should they go? What links should

we provide to them? They can see my work at the New Republic, The Guardian, some other places, but I also have a newsletter at ositaonevu.com. Yeah, where I just sort of write about politics, but also a lot of other things too. And also, Flaming Hydra, I should actually talk about, I just joined. So it's a writing collective, co-owns operated by 60 or so writers, one of the new sort of collaborative experiments happening in this extremely bad time in the media. Just writers sort of supporting each other and writing about cool stuff. So check that out too if you can. Flaming Hydra, it's got a great name. All right, we're going to leave it there for today. I want to thank you once again to our guest, Ocina Nuevo.

All right, until next time, everybody. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye. We're through being cool. We're through being cool. Eliminate the nineties and the twins. Going to bang some heads. Going to bang some heads

Going to beat some butts Time to show those evils But what? What?