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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Family Feud
00:13:46
Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the new politics of family values.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, May 12th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Let's talk about family values. Here's an early ad from Hillary Clinton's campaign.
- [01:33]
Narrator (Hillary Clinton Campaign Ad)
Then as first lady, she helped get health care for 8 million kids. You probably know the rest. The senator who made sure the heroes and families of 911 got the care they needed. The Secretary of State who joined the cabinet of the man who defeated her. Because when your president calls, you serve. And now a new title. Grandma.
- [01:54]
Katie Drummond
I believe that when families are strong, America is strong.
- [01:59]
Dorothy Wickenden
Benjamin Wallace Wells joins me to discuss the rapidly changing politics on this issue. Hey, Ben.
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Benjamin Wallace Wells
Hey, Dorothy.
- [02:07]
Dorothy Wickenden
All right, first of all, what are family values these days? Republicans and the Christian right used to own this issue.
- [02:14]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
They used to absolutely own it. And I think that this is one of the interesting theme that's gone a little bit under noticed in this election. There's been a shift, I think, and it's only going to grow more pronounced as we move towards the general election. With a contest between Trump and Clinton, the Democratic nominee is likely to talk about family quite a lot, and the Republican is likely to talk about family not at all. The issues that we talk about when we talk about families are going to be different in this election. Clinton emphasizes gender equity and pay for work. She emphasizes childcare and issues of work life balance. She emphasizes reproductive rights, a more traditional issue, too. And so, you know, rather than a kind of clutch of issues where we have the family described as a sort of social bulwark that is under threat from social change, the kind of Christian right description we have, the political idea of the family belonging to the Democrats, and the way that you hear Clinton in that ad talking the family there is a sort of vector for social change. It's not a static bulwark anymore, and I think that's pretty significant.
- [03:23]
Dorothy Wickenden
So do you think Republicans have accepted the fact that the nuclear family, as it used to be called, just doesn't resemble that at all anymore? The old image of a father, mother and two kids.
- [03:34]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
But there's kind of an interesting specific intellectual lineage here. Charles Murray, who is the author of the Bell Curve, which in the 90s, this is very noxious text that sought to establish a link between race and intelligence, published a kind of interesting book a few years ago called Coming Apart. And his thesis was that the moral experience of wealthy white parts of the country and poor white parts of the country had become completely different. That what he called in a kind of classic social conservative framing the civic virtues of America had been, you know, entirely lost to poor white Americans. You had no social cohesion. You had no people going to church. Families were collapsing. The kinds of decay that conservatives had for decades decried among African Americans, Murray said, were very obviously happening among poor white Americans. And it's been interesting to kind of trace the response to that. It became a very powerful idea among conservative intellectuals and fired some of the interest, particularly in Rubio's campaign, with trying to design programs that would work for the white working class. But it wasn't any of those programs or any of the candidates who took up Murray's mantle who won the affections of the white working class. It was Donald Trump who basically said, you know, I'm not worried about moral decay. Nothing that you are doing is wrong. The problem is Chinese, and we're going to go get them.
- [05:05]
Dorothy Wickenden
You talk about the social conservatives, and it was interesting. Last week, Russell Moore, who's a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote an op ed for the Times attacking Trump, his nativism and bigotry and basically pleading with white Christians to speak out against him. Tell us about the significance of that.
- [05:23]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Russell Moore has become a really interesting figure in the politics of this moment. What you see with Moore, who's been very prominent in TV talk shows and on the op ed pages through this election, and also sort of fellow traveler, elected officials like Ben Sasse, the young Republican senator from Nebraska, is a kind of summoning of traditional social conservative language to just condemn Trump, to say that this is somebody who has forgotten everything that we stand for, who does not defend the traditional family, who has no sense that there has been a kind of social fall that needs to be remedied. And I think that that is a kind of interesting idea, not just in this election cycle, but moving forward. You see with young senators like Ben Sasse and Tom Cotton from Arkansas, the possibility for an anti Trump reaction that might move through the Republican Party afterwards. And I think that the kind of socially conservative denunciation of Trump is a powerful one. You know, Moore also had an earlier op ed in the Washington Post where he argued that to him, and again, this is a man who's the head of the public policy army of the Southern Baptist Convention. The word evangelical had come to lose its specificity and power. And he wrote that he had come to, in his own interactions, stop identifying himself as an evangelical. And so there is at the heart of the Christian rite something sort of interesting happening, feeling that religion has maybe been a little bit badly used in the public sphere. And there is an interesting tension then between, at the heart of this, like, very important historical relationship between the Christian right and the Republican Party.
- [07:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
If you take Catholic Americans and Baptists and other socially conservative denominations, that's a huge voting bloc. Do you see the same kinds of things happening in the Catholic Church, especially under the current Pope?
- [07:23]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think that's a good point. And I think also, you know, the American Catholic Church is coming under some separate pressures over the last decade, some of which are demographic, it's increasingly Hispanic, and some of which operate and react to the priest sex scandals. One of the interesting things about conservatism in this election is the kind of changing role that religion plays. Religious authority is no longer quite so clearly in sync with the stated policies of Republican political operatives. And, yeah, you certainly see that with the Catholic Church, and I think you see it in interesting ways with the kind of evangelical establishment as well.
- [08:04]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now, and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [08:31]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I want a shark that.
- [08:33]
Katie Drummond
That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [08:37]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online.
- [08:44]
Katie Drummond
To the best of my ability, every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day at six, some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [09:15]
Dorothy Wickenden
So we have two presumptive candidates for president who are distrusted by large numbers of voters for different reasons, but many of them are observant whites who want better lives for themselves and their children. So Hillary's talking about family values. How does Trump, who has been twice divorced and who does not, seem particularly observant, really, how does he counter that, aside from reminding us, as he has been doing, of Bill's philandering and granted her problematic defense of her husband?
- [09:42]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah, I think the emphasis is on personal morality rather than public morality or morality of policy. I think he's just going to keep calling Hillary a liar. You know, crooked Hillary is the name he selected. And there's something kind of interesting happening with this branding in this election. It did not seem obvious to me that, like little Marco or Lyon Ted were such poignant denunciations, but somehow Trump has made them stick. So I think that's what's going to happen, is that there's going to be a move to these kind of personal attacks. Personal morality. Is Trump the right messenger for that? No, for obvious reasons. But it's instructive to look at Hillary's approval and disapproval ratings. I've been really surprised how bad they've been. If you look back at 2007 and 2008, when she was getting ready to run for president the last time, when her history was already like a very vivid part of public memory, when she wasn't as far removed from the scandals of the Clinton administration, her approval ratings are pretty strong, and it's a little tricky to figure out why that would have changed so much this time around. But I think the most obvious possible answer is that the scandals with her email, the image that she is a liar, that she is basically untruthful, has.
- [10:58]
Dorothy Wickenden
Stuck, you know, as recently as the 1990s. Phyllis Schlafly, you mentioned this in a piece that's being posted today, described the idea of a childcare policy as a feminazi plot to take women out of the home. And it's sort of amazing to think about that now that working class vot need two incomes and affordable health care just to get by.
- [11:20]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
And just that language, I mean, stem and Nazi, my God, was it really two decades ago that we were talking about that? I think one of the most interesting statistical observations about Americans that I've noticed in this election is this number out of Gallup that over the last 15 years, we've moved from about one third of Americans defining themselves as working class to one half. That's a pretty remarkable change. And, you know, Neera Tanden, who is a longtime Hillary Clinton adviser, president of the center for American Progress, said to me that she thought that the issues that Hillary Clinton was stressing in this campaign of childcare, of more class balance, of pay equity, are issues that have basically been making their way up the economic ladder as economic anxieties have made their way up the economic ladders for a long time. These were issues that if you wanted to win the votes of single, unmarried women with children, you would talk a lot about childcare because childcare is very important to them. But now that even among professionals and wealthy Americans, surpassingly few, particularly young women who do not have careers or aspire to them. And I think that there is a real power to Hillary Clinton's candidacy, both in its historic nature and in its movement of the center of concern in American policy to the problems that working women address, I think there's a great power to that that hasn't really been fully realized because we've been talking for a long time about the remarkable populist sur that's characterized this election on both the right and the left. And I suspect that as this election goes on, that's going to be a stronger and stronger theme. Certainly the Clinton campaign would like it to be.
- [13:02]
Dorothy Wickenden
But getting back to your point about personal morality, you also say in this piece that there's something deeply true in Trump's focus on economic causes, not moral ones. What did you mean by that?
- [13:13]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
If you look back at the George W. Bush administration, one of the ways in which it was Most sort of praised and lauded was in the programs of compassionate conservatism, which were, in their own way, efforts to correct what was seen as a moral decay among the working class. You know, abstinence only education programs to prepare people for marriage. You know, education was sort of part of this. But that project of moral education, I think is something that appeals to the wealthy white parts of this country much more than it does to the white working class parts of the country. One of the things that has really fired the Trump phenomenon is a kind of affront at condescension that white working class people in particular are being talked down to by the media, by liberals. And I think that the projects of compassionate conservatism had a kind of essential condescension to them. And if you look at, you know, what we know about why white working class families fall apart, it's hard to spot any kind of moral decay. They're just under stress from the same problems of money and time that all the rest of us are. And so in a way, I think that maybe those people sort of know what's best for them. Best of all. And Trump, for all his excesses and hate mongering and demagoguery, has not said to those people, there is something morally wrong with you that needs to be fixed. And he has said, you're doing fine.
- [14:54]
Dorothy Wickenden
Hillary Clinton has not managed to break through to that contingent.
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Benjamin Wallace Wells
She certainly hasn't. The place that Hillary Clinton has managed to break through where Trump is quite weak is with married white women. Does Mitt Romney won married white women over Obama last time? Donald Trump does not look like he's going to do that this time. This is two sides of the same coin. At some level, Clinton has a weakness with those voters who have sort of traditionally been talked down to. Trump has got real problems with the sort of socially established.
- [15:27]
Dorothy Wickenden
Okay, thanks so much, Ben.
- [15:29]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Sure.
- [15:29]
Dorothy Wickenden
Benjamin Wallace Wells is a staff writer. His work has been collected in the best American political writing. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. You can find more political analysis and commentary from Ben Wallace Wells and others on new yorker.com or on the New Yorker app, available at no extra charge from the App Store and Google Play. Tell us what you thought of this podcast, rate and review the politics and more podcast on it. This podcast is produced by Alex Barron and Jill Duboff. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [16:11]
Katie Drummond
America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [16:30]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story.
- [16:32]
Katie Drummond
From this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [16:43]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
From. PRX.