What's The Matter With Kansas?

In 2004, historian Thomas Frank proposed a theory about the rightward drift of the white working class. Was he a prescient king whose work presaged the rise of Trump — or a bumbling fool with a broken thesis?  Unfortunately it turns out he is a secret third thing that takes one hour and six minutes to explain.

Special thanks to Julia Valdés for her help with this episode!

Where to find us: 

• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Thesis That Drove American Politics Crazy: The Emerging Democratic Majority
• What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?
• Class is Dismissed
• The White Working Class and the Democratic Party
• It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class.
• How the diploma divide came to dominate American politics
• The 'Diploma Divide': Does It Exist for Racial and Ethnic Minorities?
• Blind Retrospection: Why Shark Attacks Are Bad For Democracy
• Nationally poor, locally rich: Income and local context in the 2016 presidential election
• Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
• Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America
• Political Landscapes of Donald Trump
• The White Working Class and the 2016 Election
• Partisanship by family income, home ownership, union membership and veteran status
• The Elites Had It Coming
• What Explains Educational Realignment Among White Americans?

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Transcript

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Peter: Going to another city and just bouncing around the thrift stores is one of the most unhinged things I've ever heard in my life. 

Michael: They have like nine goodwill’s that I've never been through. 

Peter: What does the trash in this city look like? That's the question that Michael Hobbs is always asking. 

Michael: Well, what else is there to do? I don't drink. 

Peter: Good Lord. 

Michael: I bike to the fucking goodwill’s. 

Peter: What am I supposed to do? 

Michael: Where else would I get a mastiff shirt? I have a shirt that says mastiff. I also have one that says mastiff mama. 

Peter: That's a great point. Where else would you get. Unless, of course, you went straight to the dumpster. 

Michael: I like my shirt, I like my choices, I had a great time in Austin, and I have a topical zinger. 

Peter: Okay. 

Michael: I was going to do something about Brown Back Mountain. It's maybe too niche, only Kansas heads will know. 

Peter: Michael. 

Michael: Peter. 

Peter: What do you know about What's The Matter With Kansas? 

Michael: I have no idea What's The Matter With Kansas, but I do know that the way to fix it is to send national political pundits there 24 hours at a time to reach sweeping conclusions. 

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Peter: So, this is a book from 2004 by Thomas Frank, who's sort of a lefty historian, journalist guy. He's one of the co-founders of the Baffler. To start off here, I feel like you need to situate yourself in 2002. George W. Bush is the president. We are post 9/11, so he is crazy popular. His approval rating briefly passed 90% after the attacks in November of 2002. The GOP sweeps the midterms, they control the presidency, The House and the Senate. Democrats are in a state of what is basically complete despair.

Michael: Let me just hold my breath, pause for a moment, and try to picture what that's like. I might need more time for this just to feel that way. 

Peter: In the midst of all this, John Judis, who's a politics writer, and Ruy Teixeira, who's a political scientist, they publish a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority. 

Michael: Oh, yeah. 

Peter: And they basically argue that if you look at changing demographics in this country, women, people of color, people with higher levels of education, they were all gaining a larger share of the electorate. And theory was that this would deliver the future to Democrats, right? 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: And this really captured the attention of Democratic strategists and political scientists and pundits because it felt so counterintuitive at the time. It felt like Republicans ruled the world. Not only were they in power. But, the war on terror as an issue dominated our politics and culture, right?

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Most television shows were about the importance of being racist against Muslims in 2002. That's what the world was like. 

Michael: Or like 2024, where it's like, “Let's bravely ask if torturing is the way.” 

Peter: Would it be okay torture a Muslim? Let's create a fictional scenario where it is so that we can all enjoy it. That was the premise of 2024. 

Michael: The only antagonist they didn't torture on that show was the cougar that attacked his daughter in the woods. 

Peter: So, enter this book in 2004 into that world. I actually kind of liked this book, I'm going to be honest. This is a situation where I went into it thinking that this was a broken thesis. But I actually think it holds up well in most respects or at least some major respects. [crosstalk] And I just wanted to use the book as a jumping off point for talking about what's going on in American politics and the Republican base. I did a ton of political science research for this.

Michael: Cool. 

Peter: Thomas Frank, not a political scientist. And he has said this. He's just describing a trend that he's seeing. So, I don't want to frame everything, like I'm like, debunking Thomas Frank because I don't think that he's necessarily making political science claims, really.

Michael: So, this is not a, If Books Could Kill episode. This is a, if books could do their best but have some blind spots episode. 

Peter: That's right. 

Michael: If books could learn together with us. 

Peter: The last time I did a book that I said up top, I didn't think was that stupid. It was Atomic Habits. And then people still yell at me. They're like, “Nothing seemed that wrong with a book.” And I'm like, “I said that.”

Michael: We should have called this show “Some books are good and some books are bad.” And then people would know what the situation was. 

Peter: Now this. I feel bad for doing this to our listeners, but I also felt this was kind of cathartic for me. 

Michael: This also makes you the only person who has a post-election take that's based on something you actually read and learned, rather than just regurgitating something you already thought. So, proceed, Governor. Yeah. 

Peter: Thomas Frank makes a bunch of arguments in this book. I'm going to try to section them off. And I have distilled them into three major pieces. First, he claims that the White working class is shifting away from Democrats and voting for Republicans despite the fact that Republican policies don't benefit them. 

Michael: I kind of agree with him.

Peter: Second, he says that this is because conservative elites have basically duped the white working class into acting against their own interests by pushing cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Michael: Ding, ding, ding,

Peter: And then third, he says that part of why this scheme works is that Democrats have embraced neoliberal policies that leave working people behind. 

Michael: I would say that's nuanced, but we can get there. 

Peter: Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. I will also throw another caveat in here before anyone yells at me. When we talk about the white working class, we're leaving out big chunks of the working class that are not white. At the time Frank wrote this, and really up until 2024 to some degree, it made sense to talk more about the white working class because those were the people who were shifting their behavior. Whereas, until fairly recently, the black working class was pretty much voting the same way they had voted for half a century. 

Michael: Right, right. 

Peter: Frank was looking at specific phenomena of white people leaving the Democratic Party. 

Michael: This is a whites only podcast. We're finally doing the whites only. 

Peter: Finally, someone is talking about what's going on with white people. 

Michael: When will we have an election where we talk about working class whites? 

Peter: I am going to send you the opening paragraph of the book. 

Michael: The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It's on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns. And in the election of 2000, the Republican candidate for President, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80%. This puzzled me when I first read about it, as it puzzled many of the people I know. For us, it is the Democrats who are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak, and of the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic. It is part of the ABCs of adulthood. When I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High-Plains County so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. How can anyone who's ever worked for someone else vote Republican? She asked. How could so many people get it so wrong? Okay. 

Peter: So, this basic thesis spawned a big debate in academia. Larry Bartels, an esteemed political scientist who was at Princeton at the time, he publishes a piece called What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas? 

Michael: Nice. 

Peter: He looks at data about white people in the lower third of the income scale and he says, contrary to Frank, “White working-class people are not moving to the Democratic Party, they're not becoming more conservative, they are not prioritizing religious and moral issues over economic ones.” 

Michael: Oh. 

Peter: And he points out that support for Democrats among low-income white voters has actually been pretty stable for decades. 

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: But then in a twist, Thomas Frank, who again, is not a political scientist, responds to Bartels and kind of owns him, I think. 

Michael: Oh, okay. 

Peter: Bartels is looking at white people at the bottom third of the income distribution. But Frank points out that's kind of deceptive because very large chunks of that population are, for example, students or retired people. A lot of students are low income, but only temporarily. And many retired people, for instance, are low income but quite wealthy and had higher income in the past. So just using income as your metric is very clean in some ways, but it actually is not capturing the right demographic here. 

Michael: Please tell me he called his response. What's the matter with What's The Matter with What's The Matter with Kansas? [Peter laughs] Now, it sounds like a number from a Broadway musical. 

Peter: Ruy Teixeira, one of the guys who wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority book, he looked into this and found that if you introduce the variable of a college degree, the situation changes dramatically. So, if you look at people without college degrees who make 30 to 50k per year, the white working class has been steadily shifting away from Democrats since the 1960s. In fact, all white people have been shifting away from the Democrats since the 1960s, but the trend is much more severe for whites with lower socioeconomic status.

Michael: There's also a thing of like many, many, many more people are getting college degrees during that time too. So, it also, that cohort of people without college degrees making sort of bottom third of the income ladder, the number of people in that cohort, the percentage of the population in that cohort is also changing at the same time. 

Peter: They're still quite large as a percentage of the population, but they are shrinking. Yeah.

Michael: Because I think it's like 35% of the population has a college degree now. 

Peter: Yes, right, exactly. 

Michael: Up from like less than 10%. 

Peter: So basically, whether you think the white working class is leaving the Democratic Party depends mostly on how you define it, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: If you define it as people at the bottom third of the income distribution, then no. But if you start factoring in college degrees, occupational status, etc., they are. I don't think we need to like resolve the question of which definition is right. 

Michael: Damn it, Peter. 

Peter: To me, the bottom line is, like, Frank is correct in the sense that he has identified a real population that is shifting away from the Democratic Party. 

Michael: And yeah, and you can call them the white working class. You can call them whatever you want, but this is just a distinct group of people. And the shift is real. 

Peter: After the 2004 election, when Bush won reelection, this was like a hot topic to some degree and I think was a hot topic in part because of Frank. The catchphrase at the time was moral values voters. 

Michael: Oh, God, just say people who hate gay people. This is taking forever. We live in hell. Anytime you hear the word moral in politics, it's like, “Oh, we're not actually talking about morality. We're talking about people who don't like thinking about what I do with other gentlemen.” 

Peter: So, if you look at Pew Survey data, in 1994 voters with college degrees favored Republicans by about a 10-point margin. In 2004, they were about even. And now it is completely flipped. This is a big post-election narrative right now. The diploma divide. It's a little bit oversimplified in the media in part because the divide doesn't really exist for other races. 

Michael: Oh, interesting. 

Peter: It's mostly confined to white voters. We'll see about 2024 data, but that's sort of what it looks like. Now, if you just look at white voters in 1994, white people without degrees favored the Democratic party by about 12 points. Now they favor the Republican party by over 30. 

Michael: Holy shit. That is a really big shift. 

Peter: After Trump won in 2016, the idea that he did this by like corralling the white working class was the dominant media narrative. We've talked about this. There's some truth to it, but it's also partly myth. There was a really good paper about this from a few years ago by a couple of political scientists. We'll put it in the show notes. I'm not going to say their names because they ignored my email. [Michael laughs] I don't want to hear your excuses. I don't want to hear someone say, “I'm a political scientist and you emailed me Friday night before the election and never followed up after that.” That's not what I want to hear, okay? What I want to hear is, “Thank you, sir, here's my calendar.” Okay.

Michael: So, we're just going to call you dumb bitch one and dumb bitch two, et al. 

Peter: What these anonymous authors found was that if you look at white people below the median income with no college degree steadily moving to the Republican Party since 1992, and the 2016 election was just following the same trend. So, Trump captured a little more of the white working class than Romney, but like Romney captured more than Bush, Bush captured more than Dole. And there were hiccups, right? Obama did well in 2008 with these groups, but for the most part, yeah, Trump's support among the white working class defined like this was basically as you would expect if you look at this chart. 

Michael: I also want to say that now that I've been to Texas for 72 hours, I can pretend to be an expert on these people. 

Peter: That's right. 

Michael: Although the only actual person I met there was this hottest Breakfast Barista who asked me what my podcast was called and then ghosted on me after I sent him an episode. I was trying to think of like the sexiest episode we've done. Like, what's the episode that makes me look the strongest and most masculine? And I thought, Rich Dad Poor Dad was it, but maybe it was the Rule. 

Peter: You should have sent him the episode where you sound the most diminutive. 

Michael: What is that pronunciation? Diminutive. 

Peter: Diminutive. 

Michael: Diminutive. 

Peter: Diminutive. 

Michael: Diminutive. There's no ua. He picks up his phone to go Google. He picks up his phone. 

Peter: Absolutely. 

Michael: He picks up his phone to check.

Peter: I am absolutely checking up the pronunciation. 

Michael: Trust but verify. 

Peter: Yeah, you're right. 

Michael: Dimin-utive. 

Peter: Correct. All right, cut this, cut this. 

Michael: If you were trying to impress a girl, what episode would you send them? 

Peter: I feel like I have to ask my wife this, maybe The Game. 

Michael: I was just about to say that because you seem super woke. You're like, “I'm more woke than these bad guys.” 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: I'll trick you into sex using my brain and my feelings, my heart. 

Peter: I tricked my wife into sex the old-fashioned way. [Michael laughs] Six years of commitment, bought her a house in New Jersey, that sort of thing. Much more effective than my previous strategy, the black light. So that's sort of part one of thesis. And it's hard to argue. He's obviously identified something here. These are the people that he's talking about. But the real, the trickier part is, why. Why is this happening? Frank talks a lot about Kansas’ history of radicalism and left-wing populism. Some of the most radical elements of the anti-slavery movement in the country were in Kansas, John Brown and the Free Soilers plus you had the populist party of the 1890s. There were places in Kansas that were strongholds for Eugene V. Debs. So, he's sort of like, how did this place evolve into a conservative stronghold, right?

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: And he frames modern conservatism as basically a bait and switch. Republicans generate outrage over cultural issues, and they use that political capital to implement policies that favor business over working people. So, the working people are basically being duped into supporting a party that undermines their own material conditions. 

Michael: This is roughly how I would put it right, if I was like, speaking off the cuff. 

Peter: We'll get to like what I think he's wrong and right about, but there's definitely some truth here. 

Michael: I wrote an article when I was at HuffPost about differing life expectancies in Republican controlled versus Democrat controlled states. And like, it's really stark. 

Peter: It also is important to remember that a lot of the people upon whom that harm is inflicted are not necessarily the ones voting for it. 

Michael: Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: A lot of the damage is being done to poor black communities in Mississippi, for example, if you're looking at that state, it's hard to sort of identify who exactly is voting against their interest and who isn't. And it's also hard to know-- You can't really prove or disprove the idea that Republican leaders are duping the voters. Frank's primary argument in support of this is that the right doesn't deliver on its culture war promises. I'm going to send you his argument here, hold on. 

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: He's going to talk about the cons and what he means is like the farther right conservative bloc. 

Michael: He says, “The cons have altered the state's political environment considerably, but their record as legislators is more mixed. Like their faction nationally, they have made virtually no headway in the culture wars. They have not halted abortion in Kansas or secured a voucher program, or even managed to keep evolution out of the schools. Indeed, the issues the cons emphasize seem all to have been chosen precisely because they are not capable of being resolved by the judicious application of state power. Senator Brownback, for example, is best known for stands that are purely symbolic, against cloning, against the persecution of Christians in distant lands, against sex slavery in the third world. These are issues that touch the lives of almost nobody in Kansas that function solely as rallying point for the con followers. They stoke the anger, keep the pot simmering, but have little to do with the practical day to day uses of government power. Thus, they allow the politician in question to grandstand magnificently while avoiding any identification with the hated state.” 

Yeah, this is my thing with like right wing propaganda, which is like, you pick these weird things of like-- They've got kitty litter in the bathrooms at the school or like they're canceling people online. And a lot of these issues don't really have like a legislative fix, but it's just easy to whip people into an emotional state and then say, “Vote for me,” to basically send a thumbs down to these people who you don't like or these people who are condescending to you or whatever. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: I also don't let people off the hook though, and just be like, “Oh, well, they don't really care. They're not going to legislate this kind of stuff.” I don't know. I think you should take politicians at their word. 

Peter: I agree with that. I agree that you shouldn't imagine that they are faking it. I think Frank finds it relatively hard to believe that all of this is sincere. But I do think that he's correct here when he says this stuff doesn't actually affect anyone. You can see this with trans rights now. How many people are upset about like the one trans athlete and there's like ten of them. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: It's true that there is a disproportionate response from the right on a lot of these cultural issues. And I think that's because they are symbolic. Frank is sort of taking that and going a little bit further and saying, like, “This is just what the sort of business elites leverage to get what they want.” Lower taxes, less antitrust, etc. That part feels to me like it is a little bit speculative. 

Michael: I think a lot of people were grossed out by gay people in the early 2000s, like, very sincerely. I think they had a lot of animus toward gay people and they have a lot of genuine animus toward trans people now. I think this weird thing of like, “They don't really care.” It's like, first of all, it doesn't matter. And secondly, like, no, I think a lot of these people genuinely hate what they consider to be their social lessers. They hate marginalized groups. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: I don't see any reason not to take people at their word on this stuff. 

Peter: I think it's a mistake to think that the only real type of politics is politics that involves money. Your material well-being is the only thing that should matter to you, and everything else is sort of in some way a distraction or a mistake. I don't think that that's the right way to think about politics. And I think this can mislead folks on the left who are materially oriented. I think it's good to be materially oriented, but I think it leads to them not quite understanding the culture wars.

Michael: And also, these people did deliver. I mean, like, what was it? 14 states passed constitutional amendments against gay marriage in the early 2000s. 

Peter: Right. He's sort of implying that they're just dangling these carrots in front of their supporters without ever delivering, just like always moving it a little bit further, but I don't think that's true. I think that there are laws that inflicted real harms on gay people. There are laws that restricted access to abortion clinics. These things were real. And I think he sort of overlooked them because it's not quite his beat. 

Michael: And also, I think partly to downplay the threat. I think a lot of people just don't want to believe what's happening. I mean, you've heard of these focus groups where they describe Republicans proposed policies to people and they literally don't believe them [crosstalk]. They don't want to cut Social Security, come on, that would be crazy. There was also-- I mean, it's all been memory hold now, but there were decades of punditry saying like the Supreme Court would never overturn Roe because it would damage the credibility of the institution so much, and then they did it. 

Peter: I still believe that. [Michael laughs] I'm still shopping that Op-Ed to the New York Times. 

Michael: You could probably still get it published honestly. [Peter laughs] This one doesn't cut. This is a mulligan, man. Roberts secretly-- Roberts doesn't want it. 

Peter: So, there is an element of what Frank is saying, though that does seem provably true if you look at data, which is the white working class does seem to prioritize cultural issues more than they used to relative to economic issues. So, a few months ago, William Marble, a political scientist at Penn, and by the way, I'm going to continue to name drop dozens of political scientists except for the ones that [Michael laughs] didn't email back. 

So, William Marble does analysis where he runs some regressions and he found out that people without college degrees have been increasingly prioritizing cultural issues and immigration over the last few decades. So Frank is half right here. I don't know that he's right about the intentions of conservative elites, but it's true that the white working-class cares more about social issues than they used to. That's not made up. That's something that is really happening. 

And I think we can use that to go on a little bit of a tangent here. There's an underlying argument that Frank is prodding at and that I think especially in light of the last election, is worth talking about and that is our voters fucking stupid. Voter rationality is something that's been studied extensively by Larry Bartels, who's the same dude who wrote What's the Matter with What’s the matter with Kansas? And then sort of in my mind, lost the argument. 

Let's start in 1916, the presidential election between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson wins, of course, but somewhat inexplicably loses his home state of New Jersey. Do you know what accounts for this? Have you heard this story? 

Michael: No. 

Peter: The answer is shark attacks. 

Michael: What? 

Peter: That summer there were a series of deadly shark attacks at the Jersey shore. Not only were people very frightened, but it was devastating for tourism. Bartels runs a bunch of analysis regressions, controls for every variable he can and concludes, “In summary, then every indication in the New Jersey vote returns is that the horrifying shark attacks during the summer of 1916 reduced Wilson's vote in the beach communities by about 10 percentage points.” 

Michael: Idiocracy, the documentary. We've always been here. 

Peter: Little side note, I didn't really know this, but in like the popular imagination, sharks weren't that dangerous before this. 

Michael: Oh, really? 

Peter: So, this and like a couple of other incidents basically change perceptions to the point where like, you can make jaws and everyone understands that sharks are scary, but it used to be that sharks were just large fish. 

Michael: Dude, do you know how many people die of food poisoning every year? It's like thousands. But like, that's never been a political issue, even though it's like the most political issue, because it depends on like inspections and stuff. Just no one has ginned it up into anything. 

Peter: A couple of these attacks happened in like a creek. 

Michael: What? 

Peter: Yeah, I don't know. 

Michael: [laughs] Are we sure they were sharks? It might have been like crickets or something. 

Peter: You think that crickets shoot a man to death at the bottom of a New Jersey creek? 

Michael: They might have big crickets in New Jersey, Peter. I don't know, you'll have to go report back. 

Peter: They do, they do. Trust me. There was a big ass cricket in my home a couple months ago and we sicced the cat on it and she didn't do shit. She's not protecting this home at all. So, the point being here that just experiencing something negative, even though it had nothing to do with the president or the federal government, made people vote against the incumbent.

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: There actually was not a ton of research on voter rationality until the mid-century. In 1960, there's a study published called the American Voter, they surveyed voters and essentially found that people knew very little about policy and did not have coherent beliefs. They found that, “Many people know the existence of few if any of the major issues of policy,” and “large portions of an electorate do not have meaningful beliefs.” 

Michael: [laughs] I mean, yeah, this is something I'm saying all the time. This is why public polling on any issue is so bad, because people change their minds constantly. 

Peter: Don't get ahead of me. Don't get ahead of me. Don't get ahead of me.

Michael: Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Cook, king, cook. 

Peter: This is particularly funny because now if you're just like, yeah, if you talk to the average person, they don't know anything about politics. I think that's something that most of us rationally know, right?

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: If you're someone who does follow politics, you know that the median voter doesn't know a lot. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: But this was like the first time it was being studied and these nerds were like baffled by these dipshits. [Michael laughs] You know what I mean? They're just like, “What is going on?” 

Michael: People respond to things they're told and form beliefs?

Peter: There is a portion where they just profile a bunch of voters they talk to. And I'm just going to send you a couple of them. 

Michael: It says, “Wife of a brewery worker in Kansas. She had migrated from Alabama to Kansas. Had been a Democrat, but felt that all good people in Kansas, save her husband, were Republican. Did not know much about Stevenson or Eisenhower, but felt Eisenhower was well liked. She voted Republican in 1956.” 

Peter: All right, here's another one. 

Michael: “Young woman, Illinois, eligible to vote for the first time, a typist in a business office. Her family had been Democratic, but all of the men where she worked were Republican. She liked President Eisenhower, but she did not like the men she worked for. She did not vote, but secretly hoped the Democrats would win.” I've also hated things because people I don't like, like them. 

Peter: Absolutely. 

Michael: This is how I felt about FKA Twigs [Peter laughs] for a very long time. This is how all of us form our views, man. 

Peter: Wow, that's deep cut gay community stuff. I won't get involved. 

Michael: [laughs] I do like her, but the most annoying people in the world really liked her. And so, for a long time I was like, “Hmm.” Also, why I refuse to Google Dua Lipa. Dua-- 

Peter: What the fuck? You don't know how to pronounce Dua Lipa? 

Michael: Why the dumbest gay men alive think she's good. So, I'm just like, “I'm not going to get invested.” 

Peter: Yeah, she is good. 

Michael: Even less likely I'm going to listen to her now, Peter.

Peter: I thought were going to do an end-of-year episode about who's the top pop girly of 2024? [Michael laughs] And now I feel like, you can't even participate. 

Michael: But everyone knows it's Chappell Roan. There's no point in doing that.

Peter: Wrong, I think it's Sabrina. And I was ready to make the case. Okay, let's go on. Let's move on, let's move on. Again, sort of common sense now, but at the time, this is new information. These political scientists are like, “Hmm, the common person is a complete buffoon. What are we going to do about this?” A few decades later, there's a wave of political science that sort of pushes back. 

In 1992, a political scientist named Benjamin Page published a book called The Rational Public, where he argued that even though individuals are not very well informed in the aggregate, they make reasonable decisions primarily by taking cues from politicians and media. This is similar to an idea that has existed for a long time in social science. The miracle of aggregation, it's sometimes called. This traces back to a social theorist, Marquis de Condorcet, or in the original French, Marquis de Condorcet, [Michale laughs] I believe it's pronounced. 

Michael: I love that you're sub-tweeting every listener to the show now. You're like, look.

Peter: No, I'm doing French duo-lingo. So that the disgust, no, not really. 

Michael: Whereas I take a more laissez-faire [Peter laughs] approach to pronunciation on the show. 

Peter: I'm trying to think of who would be the most insufferable if I don't pronounce something and its people who speak a little bit of French. You know what I mean? 

Michael: [laughs] Yeah. I noticed living abroad that, like, Germans, actual Germans, do not care if you say Munich. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: But somebody who has spent a weekend there will be like, actually, it's München.

Peter: Just a little fact I picked up during my travels. [Michale laughs] So, Condorcet as it is pronounced, Condorcet. 

Michael: Condorcet. 

Peter: He basically showed that if you have a jury and each juror is only slightly more likely than not to make the right decision as a whole, they are very likely to make the right decision. Wisdom of the crowd sort of thing. 

Michael: I'm a little nervous resting democracy on that phenomenon, but sure. 

Peter: And there's also this idea called “The retrospective theory of voting,” which basically says that people don't really vote based on their policy preferences, but based on their experience of the incumbent administration. And even though that's not ideal, it sort of approximates rational choice. Like, there's a directional logic to it. So, a lot of political scientists have basically said, “Yeah, if you ask individual voters, it seems like they have no idea what's going on, but there's something that looks a little bit, like, rationality here.” 

Michael: I also don't think that, like-- I mean, despite our joking, I don't think that, like, voters are dumb is, like, a very useful way to look at things. I think most people just believe what they're told. And if you're reading news stories about, like, “Hey, shark attacks are the most important issue, and I might die in a shark attack next week. Well, then, yeah, you're going to vote for the guy who's going to reduce your chances of dying in a shark attack.” I don't know that's dumb exactly. It's more that like the media is pumping people full of irrelevant information and just expecting people to be able to see through it. And I just don't think that that's something that we should rely on. 

Peter: So, Larry Bartels and another guy, Christopher Achen, publish a book called Democracy for Realists a few years ago. It compiles their research on voter rationality and they basically conclude that voters aren't really rational in any sense. Instead, they vote based on a combination of partisan loyalty and social identity.

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: They cite some interesting research, basically arguing that a lot of issue polling gets it backwards. It's not that people have a position on an issue and then they vote for the politician based on that. They have a politician or a party that they identify with, and they take direction from them on the issue. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: So, they give the example of social security privatization, which was a big issue in the 2000 election between Gore and Bush, believe it or not, which, by the way, you were just mentioning how you can't get people to believe that Republicans want to get rid of Social Security. They literally were running on this 25 years ago. 

Michael: No, it's crazy. Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: Over the course of that campaign, the statistical relationship between voters’ views on privatization and their preference for either Bush or Gore doubled. So, at a glance, you might think that this was people sorting themselves. They had a view on the issue and then they chose the correct candidate. But some researchers conducted interviews with the same people throughout the campaign, and they found out that what was actually happening was that people who supported one candidate or the other were changing their positions on the issue to match the candidate. 

Michael: People always talk about this with legalized weed, like that's one of the issues where, I don't know, 70% of the entire population says, “Yes, we should make weed legal.” And they're like, “Oh, well, Dems should run on this.” But part of the reason why it has so much bipartisan support is because Dems haven't run on it. And the minute Dems run on it, Fox News will be like, “Oh, they want this evil drug dealer to get out of jail or whatever, they'll start doing their propaganda push and it will go into a partisan frame.” So that doesn't mean obviously people shouldn't run on it. It's obviously a really good policy. But it's just not the case that that support will remain if Kamala Harris made that the centerpiece of her presidential campaign. 

Peter: And this is also why I'm going to get ahead of myself a little bit. The Democratic Party consultancy strategy of let's just tick a little bit toward the public on this issue, it doesn't work, it doesn't work. 

Michael: Because people don't have fixed views. Yeah.

Peter: Right. People aren't choosing you based on this like rationality matrix. There's some other data that backs up this idea. They cite a political scientist named John Zaller who looked at election data and found that if you look at historical presidential election data, two variables predict the outcome of just about every election. The state of the economy during the campaign and the length of time the incumbent party has been in the White House. If you graph those variables, the correlation between them and the popular vote is extremely tight. 

Michael: Maybe people are dumb. I retract my previous statement. People are so fucking dumb. Jesus Christ. 

Peter: So, he uses this to conclude that a candidate's political ideology isn't very significant to the point where people aren't really punished for extremism the way that some people think they are. So, if you look at LBJ's win over Goldwater or Reagan over Mondale, these big famous blowouts, they're actually both basically explained by incumbency in the economy. They map onto the graph just like any other race would.

Michael: Right.

Peter: So, the idea that those guys were too extreme, Mondale and Goldwater, probably not true. It's just a function of where the economy was and what the sort of-- where the political winds were blowing. So, Bartels and Achen point to the shark attack example and they look back at historical data on droughts and floods in the United States, which basically shows that incumbent parties law something like 0.6% or 0.7% of the vote during drought or flood years. 

And so even if citizens are voting based on their experience of the current administration, that's not really rational if they're voting based on factors that are not actually related to governing. It's hard to describe that as rational behavior, someone can vote against the incumbent administration, but that's not inherently rational. What did the incumbent administration do? What is the challenger proposing to do? So, they're basically saying all of this sort of like, voters are rational in the aggregate stuff. It's pretty speculative. It's pretty wishy washy. It's based on a very loose interpretation of the word rational.

Michael: And also, potentially based on wishful thinking. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: I just don't think people want to think that politics-- Sort of the way that people like you and me experience, it doesn't really matter that much because most people are so low information. Political campaigns really aren't battles of ideas, they're essentially advertising campaigns. I mean, kind of, as 2024 demonstrated, it's like the worst campaign ever run versus like a fairly competent campaign, and the worst campaign won. 

Peter: I'm not going to sit here and let you say that Kamala's campaign was competent. I don't know about that. The more I read, the less I like it. 

Michael: I mean, some of that's hindsight 2020, though. It's like-- 

Peter: I know. That's what I love about hindsight is how clear it is, Mike. 

Michael: I mean, compared to fucking Trump, it's like Trump ran a joke of a campaign. 

Peter: All I look-- I don't want to get yelled at online, and you're sitting here saying it's competent, and you know that someone's going to reply, ignoring the entire episode and just being like, “I shut it off when you said that the Harris campaign was competent.” And I'm here to tell that person it's okay, keep listening. 

Michael: [laughs] The thing is, I'm just trying to get you yelled at this point. So, this is something that you told me to say on this podcast. This is actually directions from Peter. 

Peter: So back to Thomas Frank. He claims that powerful conservatives are hoodwinking the white working class by whipping them into a frenzy on social issues and moving their attention away from economic issues. And it does seem that political elites can sort of dictate what their party members believe to some extent, because most of those political party members are just looking toward the leadership for cues. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Sent you another piece. 

Michael: He says, “The red state, blue state divide also helped conservatives perform one of their dearest rhetorical maneuvers, which we will call the latte libel. The suggestion that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogance and foreignness of liberalism. While a more straightforward discussion of politics might begin by considering the economic interests that each party serves, the latte libel insists that such interests are irrelevant. Instead, it's the places that people live and the things they drink, eat and drive that are the critical factors, the clues that bring us to the truth.” I would like Thomas Frank to walk down the hall into the office of David Brooks and read this paragraph to him and ask him whether he is happy with the way that he has spent his career. 

Peter: I think that this is right and that it aligns with what Bartels is saying about voters. People are voting based on their social identities and affiliations. Conservative politicians and media craft a cultural identity that the white working class relates to and they take their cues from those elites about policy. he whole idea of middle America, the heartland. It's to some degree a media fiction, right?

Michael: Totally.

Peter: And it's a media fiction that conservative elites are well aware of. They pander to it. 

Michael: Totally. 

Peter: You know, like the Sean Hannitys of the world have nothing in common with these folks, but they know that they need to talk about pickups and cargo shorts or whatever.

Michael: And also feeding resentment of the other side too. Like the entire Republican messaging apparatus and reactionary centrists are essentially doing the same thing that that office worker was doing where she's like, “I don't really follow politics, but all the guys in my office are Republican and they suck. So, I hope Republicans lose.” This is like 80% of American media is just like, “Well, look at these annoying college kids. Look at this purple-haired feminist. She's a Democrat. Don't you want Democrats to lose?” 

Peter: This is another thing that I want to hammer home because I think Frank makes a good point. They are leveraging the language of class war without the class, right? 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: These people think they're better than you. You are the beating heart of America and they look down on you.

Michael: And these rich assholes think they're better than you. Vote for me, a rich asshole. 

Peter: Yeah. I also think, I do want to point out, I think Frank misdiagnoses some things. He says that, “The anti-abortion crusade is central to contemporary conservatism.” He also brings up gay marriage. All of this was probably true when he wrote it or felt true when he wrote it. But we can see now post Roe v. Wade that it's a more complex than that. Just a couple years ago, Kansas voted overwhelmingly to secure their abortion rights in the state constitution, and we've seen that in various red states. Frank thought that Kansas residents had really strong feelings about abortion and gay rights and that those feelings were being manipulated by conservative elites. It seems like what's actually happening is that conservative elites to some degree can dictate what people get angry about. 

Michael: Any issue is on some level constructed, because there's a finite number of things that end up in the newspaper that get constructed as urgent crises. Like antibiotic resistance is also like a really big issue that easily could be like a national crisis. Like there could be A1 stories about antibiotic resistance every day- 

Peter: Right.

Michael: -But it just hasn't appeared. It's like no one has constructed it as something that everybody needs to be thinking about. Whereas something fucking fake, like free speech on campus, we get like 300 feature articles about it. 

Peter: The last sort of segment of Frank's thesis is the idea that the reason that this all works, the reason that Republicans have been able to use social issues to pull the white working class away from Democrats, is that Democrats have increasingly embraced neoliberal politics that have hurt working class people. 

Michael: This is something I've heard on the 5-4 Podcast. This is a common take. 

Peter: All right, here we go. 

Michael: He says, “In the election of 1994, Wichitaans took their frustrations out on Democratic Representative Dan Glickman, a staunch Clinton loyalist who supported NAFTA even though the labor unions back in Wichita that made up his electoral base adamantly opposed the trade accord.” Says Dale Swenson, a union painter at Boeing and a Republican state senator, “When Glickman voted for NAFTA, I couldn't any longer vote for him. With Democrats and Republicans having merged on free trade, the issues that remained were abortion and guns.” 

Peter: I'm going to send you another. 

Michael: I wasn't sure about how to pronounce people from Wichita, so I asked Peter and Peter told me how to pronounce it. So, all correspondence should go to peter.shamshiri@-- 

Peter: Yeah, at least someone will be emailing me back. You know what I mean? 

Michael: Just sent those directly to Peter. He says, “The erasure of the economic is a necessary precondition for most of the basic backlash ideas. It is only possible to think that the news is slanted to the left. For example, if you don't take into account who owns the news organizations, and if you never turn your critical powers on that section of the media devoted to business news, the university campus can only be imagined as a place dominated by leftists if you never consider economics departments or business schools.” Yo, this is something we say all the time. 

Peter: Isn't it weird to just have me send you a quote and then you're just like, “Yeah, good point.” 

Michael: Yeah, [laughs] nothing to add. [Peter chuckles] Just long silences, mm-hmm. 

Peter: Preach. Preach. 

Michael: Nailed it, Thomas. 

Peter: So basically, he's saying two things were happening at once. Conservative social issues were getting more salient. Democrats were moving to the center on economic issues, making them less salient because there's now less of a gap between the parties. I have a lot of sympathy for this thesis, and I think that this can all be squared with the voter irrationality stuff quite nicely. Voters don't know enough about policy to be able to suss out which party provides more benefits for working mothers or whatever. But maybe they can see that Democrats seem to project the image of professional white-collar workers to a larger degree, and Republicans pick up on that and they’d say, “Well, why don't we project the other image, right?”

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: You can see Frank's basic thesis lining up with some of the research here and what we know about politics, but it does have some problems. First, the timeline of what he's talking about in particular is kind of fucked up. Frank points to NAFTA as a major precipitating factor here, along with other neoliberal reforms from the Clinton era. You might think that makes sense because a lot of political scientists say the white working class has been moving to the Republican Party since the early 1990s and that's when that all happened, but that's a little misleading because the trend goes back much farther. If you look at the data, Republicans were getting like, 32% of white voters without college degrees with below median incomes in 1992. 

By 2016, it was over 60. So, you might think, “Wow, huge jump.” If you look at the 1980s, though, Reagan was capturing like 56% of the group in 1984. So, it went lower in the 1990s. Yes, because Bill Clinton won some of those voters over, but also a lot of them went to Perot. You can't ignore Ross Perot in 1992 taking a huge chunk of the vote. So, most of the data seems to indicate that this trend started in the 1960s. Whites without a college degree voted for Democrats at a rate of about 55% in 1960 and 1964, in the next two elections dropped to 35%. 

Michael: Oh, wow. Okay. 

Peter: On top of that, whites lower on the socioeconomic scale moved to the Republican Party at a much faster rate in the south than in other regions. So, obvious question here. Is this just racial backlash? Is this white reaction to the civil rights movement? I am going to send you what I believe is the first bad excerpt. 

Michael: We're back in our comfort zone. He says, “Ask a liberal pundit what ails the red states? What has induced them to work so strenuously against their own economic interests, and he will probably tell you it's all because of racism. Republicans have perfected the coded racial appeal, and they rally white voters to their cause by subtly appealing to their hatred of blacks. There are undeniably a great number of places where this analysis holds true, but today's Kansas is not one of them. The state may be 88% white, but it cannot be easily dismissed as a nest of bigots. Kansas does not have Trent Lott's disease. It is not Alabama in the 1960s. It was not tempted to go for George Wallace in 1968. Few here get sentimental about the Confederate flag. Kansas may burn to restore the gold standard. It may shriek for concealed carry and gasp at imagined liberal conspiracies, but one thing it doesn't do is racism.” Thomas.

Peter: Thomas. 

Michael: I mean, I'm not going to say that Kansas is uniquely racist, but, like, come on, man. 

Peter: He's right on a couple of broad points here. Kansas doesn't have a history of racism like the Southern states. There is a history of anti-racism. John Brown is revered figure. The University of Kansas’ mascot is the Jayhawk, named after the Free Soil militias. He's also right that George Wallace only got 10% of the vote in Kansas in 1968, much lower than the Southern states, many of which Wallace won, of course. 

Michael: Also, Seattle is, like, as far from the south as you can possibly get. We had a huge fight over school desegregation here and housing desegregation. It's not like the south has a monopoly on racism, these threads are in every single population in the country. 

Peter: Look, look, look. 

Michael: Come on, come on. 

Peter: Look, the good faith read of this is that he's saying that there are people for which racism is not the motivating factor. And, sure, right. And that might even be more true in Kansas than elsewhere. 

Michael: Why not? 

Peter: But the Trump voter base is the culmination of the trend that Frank is writing about here. And if you look at the Trump coalition, it seems like racism is a big factor. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: So, there's some work by David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley where they looked at data from the 2016 American National Election Survey, which is some of the best data that comes out of elections. They noticed some discrepancies. White voters without college degrees were very likely to support Trump, but that also varied across regions. They were much more likely to support him in the South and Midwest than in the Northeast, for example, they said “White voters only favored Trump when they shared his prejudices. Less educated voters supported Trump in exceptionally large numbers because they were likely to share his prejudices against immigrants, minorities, Muslims, women, and authority figures who defended those groups. The same was true for white college graduates, who were only less visible in this respect because they were less likely, on average, in the aggregate, to share Trump's biases.” 

Michael: Right.

Peter: So, they're basically saying the big narrative coming out of the Trump era is the diploma divide. People with college degrees will vote for Democrats. People without college degrees will vote for Republicans. They're saying, “If you control for all of these various prejudices, the diploma divide goes away. The real correlation isn't with degrees, it's with prejudice. Degrees are just a good proxy.” 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: This lines up with a ton of other research about how racial resentment predicted support for Trump and Republicans. There's a book called Identity Politics by John Sides and a few others from a few years ago shows a bunch of research about this. About 30 years ago, if you were someone who attributed racial inequality between blacks and whites to a lack of effort among blacks rather than discrimination, you are not much more likely to be in one political party than the other. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: By 2012, that group goes for Republicans by about 30 points. 

Michael: I mean, I guess I do get it, but I don't get this thing that everybody wants to run away from racism as an explanation for these shifts.

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: We're one generation away from the civil rights movement, which is extremely controversial at the time. A lot of people did not like the civil rights movement. Those are like our parents and our grandparents, man. 

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: And yet, when it comes to the way that people vote, especially for an extremely fucking xenophobic candidate, they're like, “Oh, well, I think it's really the economics.” Why? 

Peter: I think that there is one thing that's sort of like-- It feels defeatist, saying, “Well, it's racism.” It feels like there's no corresponding affirmative strategy for the Democrats, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: So, saying it's racism might be a diagnosis, but there's no prescription. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: But, no, I agree. There's a really annoying trend in political analysis where the voters cannot fail. They can only be failed. So, if you're like David Brooks, when voters choose a Republican, the Democrats must have done something incredibly wrong, right?

Michael: Right. 

Peter: I feel like there's some merit to thinking like that if you're a strategist. If your job is to win votes, then sure, you need to think about what went wrong, etc. But I don't see why that precludes analysts like pundits from just criticizing the electorate, being like, “They fucked up on this one.” 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: They do terrible things all the time. And if you look back at historical elections, for example, no one has any problem being like, “Yeah, people were racist, like Southern democrats in the 1800s were racist, and that's why they voted the way they did.” But you look at people now, and everyone's like, “Ooh, let's not go there, why?” 

Michael: Or other countries, too, where People get elected being like, “Fuck the refugees. Fuck the refugees.” And then people vote for them. And we're like, “Oh, well, obviously xenophobia has something to do with this right.” Here, we're like, “Oh, no, when he said fuck the refugees, what he actually meant was, you need a higher minimum wage.” 

Peter: I will say that this stuff can get complicated. There's evidence that racial resentment increases as economic distress increases. A political scientist named Michael Tesler also did some research and showed that people with high levels of racial resentment actually rate the economy worse on average. So, it's not easy to disentangle these things. It can be hard to tell where racism ends and economics begins. But the idea that it's just not racism. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: That we don't do racism here. Wrong, wrong. 

Michael: And also, just like racism is a phenomenon and bias is just really complex. 

Peter: Yeah. I've always said that America is a land of contrast, and that's my conclusion. 

Michael: [laughs] We can tame multitudes out here. I always think about people who-- There's a lot of people who voted for Obama into 2008. And then that stupid thing where the cops broke into this guy's house at Harvard, this black professor. 

Peter: Yeah, Gates. 

Michael: Yeah, Henry Louis Gates. And then Obama had this Beer Summit where he had the cop and the dude. And a lot of people were like, “Oh, he's pandering to black people.” And that was like just weird. Like, if you listen to interviews with Tea Party people, this was a huge moment of radicalization for people was this incident. I find it utterly bizarre, but it's in the data as one of the big breaking points with his presidency, that people were like, “Oh, my God, he's a black guy.” Like, racism in the way that this plays out in people's actual behavior is so complex. There's actually a really good movie about this called Crash, which deservedly won the Oscar that year. It's so insightful, Peter. He saved her from the car, but also, he says slurs.

Peter: Probably like three times a year, I'll watch that scene where the little girl gets shot. 

Michael: Like, really? 

Peter: Yeah. That's the funniest fucking scene I've ever seen. 

Michael: What the fuck? What the fuck? 

Peter: You know what I'm talking about, right? 

Michael: No, I haven't seen that movie since the theater. 

Peter: Oh, that's Crash, right? Hold on, let me see.

Michael: What you say. I watch that scene a couple times a year. 

Peter: Okay, so you do agree that it can be funny when someone gets shot. 

[laughter] 

Michael: Wait, what happens in that scene? 

Peter: I never actually absorb the surrounding context of the scene. It's just shot hilariously. And it's a real-- Mm, What’d you say? 

Michael: It's a real Brad Pitt getting hit by a taxicab in Meet Joe Black moment, yes. 

Peter: So, there's another way to tackle this question. If these folks were moving away from Democrats mostly due to their economic conditions, you'd probably see this show up in data a little bit more than it does. If you look at white voters without college degrees in 2016, those with lower incomes were actually slightly less likely to support Trump than those with higher incomes. 

In 2018, there was a survey where a sample of Americans were asked about whether they had experienced a negative financial event in the past year, drop in income, job loss, difficulty paying bills, etc. Some researchers use these answers to create an economic distress index for these voters and basically found that Trump voters were less likely to report economic distress. 

Voter data also shows that Obama to Trump voters who are like this great mystery in the minds of the pundit. Those voters in the Midwest tended to come from high income, high employment counties. 

Michael: This is the boats for Trump phenomenon. 

Peter: Right. There's also a very interesting study in 2020 that found that although Republicans win a lot of lower income whites, that's based on national income data. So those people are low income relative to the national average, but many of them are in lower cost of living areas and they are locally rich, meaning they are better off than most people in their zip code. 

Michael: So, making 60k in Appalachia versus making 60k in New York City type of thing. 

Peter: So, people in the highest quartile of income for their local areas are more likely to vote for Trump than people in the lowest quartile by about 10 points. And in general, being locally rich is correlated with voting Republican across the country. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: My big picture takeaway, and I admit much of this is gut feeling predicated on the research and what I know, is that the white working class pulling away from the Dems, it's not just civil rights reaction per se, it's the development of a post-civil rights, white social identity. So, you get northern Republicans waving Confederate flags, right? Something that sort of confounds liberals, right?

Michael: Right.

Peter: Like what are they doing? They're signaling this social identity that Republicans project. And the people who are telling us, like, “Abandon trans people.” Like it's too unpopular. You're missing the point. If you cast trans people aside, they'll replace it with something else.

Michael: Right. Even if Democrats were like, “Okay, you're right, we should ban trans people from all sports.” All it does is it reinforces the grievance, right? 

Peter: Right.

Michael: It reinforces the narrative that these hegemonic institutions are under attack. And so, they're not going to stop that complaint. What they're going to do is they're just going to move on to the next institution. 

Peter: And you see that with immigration, they put out the fucking border bill and it didn't matter. The Democrats tried to match the Republicans- 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: -and it didn't work. It didn't work because-- I mean, first of all, people can see through you. They know that you're the less anti-immigration party. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: But also, people exist in this limited media environment. All they're taking is these very limited pieces of information, limited cues from media, from political leads, etc. And that's what they're working with. You can't like do ticky-tack bullshit and work your way around that. 

Michael: I also think I'm going to make it the way it was. It's like a really effective emotional appeal. 

Peter: There was a girl on TikTok that was getting ragged. She was probably like 20. I don't know. She was a child. She was like, “Donald Trump got elected, and you know what that means? $10 paperbacks are coming back.” 

Michael: What? Dude, somebody needs a Libby app. There's zero-dollar paper bags. 

Peter: That's so funny because it's just like your brain doing the thinnest association. If a restaurant closed in 2020, you're like, “Oh, it's going to reopen. Donald Trump is coming back.” The world doesn't just revert to what it was when he was in office. 

Michael: Looks like someone's getting a McRib next week. I don't think that's how. I don't think that's the program. 

Peter: And I think you can see some of the difficulties with the prescriptive part of this. Even in Frank's writing, he talks about the success of Kathleen Sebelius in Kansas, who was a Democrat, who basically ran left on economic issues and won. And that's not something that's totally uncommon. There are Democrats winning governorships, for example, in traditionally Republican states, primarily by putting social issues and cultural issues to the side and saying, “I'm the guy who's going to fix healthcare.” That stuff happens. I think the difficulty of Frank's position becomes clear when you realize, like, “Wait, his solution is Kathleen Sebelius?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: Like, the generic Democrat that got absorbed into the Obama administration and then disappeared. What are you talking about?” It's not so easy to navigate this stuff in real life. 

Michael: I think anybody proposing a really simple, obvious solution is just not credible. If it was easy, we would be doing it. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: The Democratic coalition is so much bigger and more diverse demographically and ideologically diverse than the Republican coalition, and it's just really hard to find somebody that appeals to everybody. 

Peter: But I think that part of why that is hard is because the white working class has moved so firmly into the Republican camp. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Peter: I think that the takeaway for me from this was that Frank, considering this was 20 years ago, was like surprisingly insightful about what was going on, why it was happening, what the appeal of this cultural and political movement was to people on the ground, why this sort of reactionary thinking is appealing. It was insightful and a good book, and I was expecting to go into it being like, “He's dumb and doesn't get it.” And by the end of it, I was like, “Actually, he cut through a whole lot of bullshit.” 

Michael: Okay, if we're wrapping up on the book, I feel like we should say the names of these authors whose work you drew from, just so we have it on the record. 

Peter: Fine. I know you would make me do this. 

Michael: Well, we have to be a nice- I feel like our thing is barbed on the surface, but then genuinely nice underneath. 

Peter: No, that's your thing. That's your-- [crosstalk] [Michael laughs] You can do whatever bullshit you want to do with Maintenance Phase. All right, you and Aubrey have fun with your- 

Michael: No.

Peter: -nice people thing. Okay? 

Michael: Give me their actual names and make a sincere little thing. I know you hate this. 

Peter: I'm saying this against my will, but I know that you're going to get mad. So, this is Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu are the names of the political scientists. 

Michael: Okay? Say something nice. Say something about how you appreciated their work.

Peter: And the work was so good. 

Michael: [laughs] Well, don't do it. Mean.

Peter: Nick Carnes is a leading scholar in this area. 

Michael: Credit the people you're crediting. 

Peter: I did. 

[laughter]

Michael: What the fuck. 

Peter: Also, the funny part of this is that I only emailed one of these dudes I did not--

[laughter] 

Michael: Even worse. 

Peter: it's so much-- like the laziest outreach. I put like a message in a bottle to this dude. It's true that their work is probably the cleanest and most useful in the field. 

Michael: Do you have a nosebleed right now? Are you bleeding out of your eyeballs from being nice? 

Peter: I just feel like if you-

Michael: Oh no. Alright.

Peter: -want your name mentioned on a popular podcast. 

Michael: [laughs] You're going back to the thing now. No. Thank you for your work. We appreciate the academics who engage with us. 

Peter: Yeah. That's not them. I don't know what to tell you. [Michael laughs] Let's talk a little bit before we wrap up about Frank's more recent work. 

Michael: Are we going to the portrait gallery? Taking us to the portrait gallery.

Peter: We'll be there. He wrote a very popular book called Listen Liberal after 2016 that hit on a lot of the same themes and got a lot of attention because it was a plausible explanation of Trump, you know? 

Michael: He also wrote a pretty good book about the wave of layoffs in the 1990s that I read for the Who Moved My Cheese episode. 

Peter: Stuff is pretty good. I don't always agree with everything, but I kind of did. He recently got attention for writing about Trump's 2024 win in a New York Times piece titled The Elites Had It Coming. I'm going to be honest. I didn't hate this piece. I thought I was going to hate it. It took some flak online, I think in large part because of the headline, which is stupid, but also was probably written by an editor. And because of this opening anecdote which I am going to send you. 

Michael: He says, “Everyone has a moment when he first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March during a visit to the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as settler colonialism. I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going. My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum, say, a family from the Midwest doing a round of national shrines and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.” 

This is the thing where they're just like, “Oh, yeah. So, I don't actually have a point because this has nothing to do with the political party in charge. This has nothing to do with politics. This is just like a thing that annoyed me.” 

Peter: “This reminded me of a thing.” 

Michael: Have you been to any museum? It's all academic jargon. [Peter laughs] Have you been to any fucking modern art museum in your whole fucking life? 

Peter: I think that if you're just like, “There are ways that the professional classes talk and leadership within the Democratic Party talks like that.”

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: I think that's right. But there's a problem here, which is we are sort of existing in this political and cultural space where like accurately describing American history is a political liability. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Peter: And that deserves discussion just as much as like this vernacular bullshit. 

Michael: What I find so frustrating about this is he's basically doing the same thing that he was critiquing in his book. He's doing the latte libel. He said conservatives are getting hoodwinked by politicians who are just focusing on like, “What Democrats eat and drink and drive and all these like aesthetic signifiers,” but here he's talking about how Democrats talk. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Which is basically the same thing. It's just another aesthetic signifier that ultimately has nothing to do with politics. 

Peter: I'm going to send you another piece from his New York Times Op-Ed. 

Michael: He says, “My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way that Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the 1990s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had. All those manifestos about futurific wired workers or the learning class. All those speeches about how Democrats had to leave the worker centric populism of the 1930s behind them. All the brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right.” He likes listing. He likes listing things. 

Peter: That's right. 

Michael: “When I was young, it seemed that every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called the center. The well-educated suburbanites and computer literate professionals everybody admired. Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get. And now here we are.” 

Peter: Yeah, I mean, he's putting a narrative gloss on some complicated stuff, but I do think that he's directionally correct and that those are the folks that run the Democratic Party. He mentions that the Biden administration made steps in the right direction so he doesn't ignore. 

Michael: Yeah. He's not going completely unmoored from reality. Yeah.

Peter: Right. But he mentions that the Harris campaign dropped their economic populist messages as the campaign went on, which I think is-- That's right. And then on the other hand, Trump and Vance mimicked the language of class war and reform, which he understands is disingenuous, but he's sort of talking about what they're projecting, so this is how the piece ends.

Michael: “Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old great society, of broad, inclusive, prosperity. This means universal healthcare and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming together of ordinary people, not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.” 

So, I had this in my notes for our Worst Election Takes Episode. And like, again, I mostly agreed with this column, but I think this is like a weird distinction that he's making. He lists all these like great policies, great reframing. I totally agree with all that stuff, but he says “Liberalism as a social movement, not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.” What policy, what politics could ever not be a series of top-down reforms by professionals? You want people who know stuff leading a political party. 

Peter: There's real tension between what he is prescribing here in the macro and what he prescribes elsewhere in the micro where he's like “Unions, antitrust,” right?

Michael: Right. 

Peter: Well, how do you think unions get protected? They get protected at the NLRB. They get protected--

Michael: Yeah, exactly. 

Peter: They get protected through legislation and like antitrust. So, he understands that the Biden FTC, for example, was pretty good on antitrust. But like, what is that if not top-down reform? 

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: This whole thing feels easier to diagnose than it does to resolve. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: But that said, I think that he is sort of onto something in the sense that-- What he's sort of prescribing is a new aesthetic for the Democratic Party, that the party needs to distance itself from the Silicon Valley elites and move elsewhere aesthetically, right? 

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: That's much easier said than done, especially in a completely fucked media environment. But I do think that that's basically right and like the project here is like a 20-year project, a 30-year project, not like, what if Pete Buttigieg says the right things in 2028? Like, that's not how we get out of this. You know what I mean? 

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: I think that what I gleaned from digging into this research was like people think too little about the aesthetics being projected by the party and too much about the details. Politics is both more complex and also simpler than Democrats are making it in different ways, right? 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Peter: And this sort of like, issue by issue bullshit that they're doing right now where they're like, “Which issues can we loudly reject to win back the center?” It's the wrong way to think about it. How do you tell people that you're on their side? How do you convince someone that you are with them at the end of the day? That's the hard part, but it's also a little bit simpler than having to go through your platform and carve out every little bit that people don't like.

Michael: I also think there's been this whole, all this hemming and hawing this week about sort of like, “We need to find the left wing, Joe Rogan.” I think we should do one better and just run Joe Rogan as the Democratic candidate for president 2028. I think why would people vote for the fake one when you get the real one? [Peter laughs]

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