← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
For the People
00:17:10
Jelani Cobb and Benjamin Wallace-Wells join Evan Osnos to discuss the diverging fates of the populist movements in the two parties.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Evan Osnos
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, March 17th. I'm Evan Osnow, staff writer for the New Yorker. In early voting contests this Tuesday, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both strengthened their chances of making it to the general election, but they celebrated their successes in very different ways. Here's Hillary Clinton speaking in West Palm beach on Tuesday evening.
- [01:42]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Thank you, Florida. Thank you, North Carolina. Thank you, Ohio.
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We are moving clothes closer to securing the Democratic Party nomination and winning this election in November.
- [02:03]
Evan Osnos
And here's Donald TRUMP Speaking to CNN's Chris Cuomo yesterday morning.
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Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think we'll win before getting to the convention. But I can tell you if we didn't and if we're 20 votes short or if we're, you know, 100 short, I don't think you can say that we don't get it automatically. I think it would be, I think you'd have riots. I think you'd have riots. You know we have. I'm representing a tremend many, many millions.
- [02:26]
Evan Osnos
Of people here to discuss Trump and Clinton's improved prospects and the different campaigns they're waging are Jelani Cobb and Benjamin Wallace Wells. Ben, let's start with you and a look at the Democratic side. We've talked many times here on this podcast about the challenge that Bernie Sanders has posed to Hillary Clinton, and yet we now find ourselves in a moment in which she has almost twice as many delegates in her camp as Sanders and and two thirds of the total that she'll need in order to secure the nomination. Is the Sanders campaign effectively over at this point? And if it is, what does that mean for Hillary Clinton identity?
- [03:03]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee, but I don't think that that means the Sanders campaign is effectively over. From the beginning, Hillary Clinton had such a structural advantage that it was always an extreme long shot that Bernie Sanders would be the nominee. But I think if you take the long view, I think what Sanders campaign was about at the outset was trying to shift the party a little bit to the left. And I think that that project has been pretty successful, and I think that it continues. I think that the more that he can continue to make inroads into minority communities and prove to Clinton that there's a kind of broad base of left support within the party, the more that he can accomplish his mission. So I think that both candid, at least at the outset, had somewhat different goals. And I think it's very plausible to see that they both might, by the end here, accomplish them.
- [03:56]
Evan Osnos
And so if we now turn to the Republican side for a minute, you saw a surprise win in Ohio from John Kasich, the governor of that state. But otherwise, it was really a clean sweep by Donald Trump, including a humiliating defeat of Marco Rubio in his home state of Florida, where he lost every county except his own Miami Dade. So how much of a challenge at this point do Kasich and Ted Cruz still pose to Donald Trump?
- [04:20]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think the question is not exactly what the threat is that Kasich poses or even Cruz poses. It's what threat is posed by Republicans just deciding they can't abide a Trump candidacy. My own view, and this is why we hear this talk about Trump threatening riots in the streets of Cleveland. Amazing scene. My own view is that the Republican Party looks so disorganized and incoherent right now that it's just sort of impossible, no matter how much they want it, to see them pulling some devious procedural maneuver, changing the rules a week before the convention and wrenching the nomination away from Trump. So, yeah, I think we're Pretty well on our way to a Donald Trump nomination.
- [05:06]
Evan Osnos
So is this talk of a contested convention somewhat overblown?
- [05:11]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
It's hard for me to see, given the level of animosity towards the Trump candidacy that you've seen from basically all of the traditional components of the party, that somebody's not going to try. But I doubt that it's going to be broad enough and well supported enough to actually work.
- [05:26]
Evan Osnos
Jelani, you wrote really powerfully this week about something that you call the populism of identity, which seems to be at the heart of Trump's success. What are you describing when you say the populism of identity?
- [05:40]
Jelani Cobb
One of the more notable things about Donald Trump is that prior to this, he's been known as a businessperson, and his campaign has, of course, talked about trade and some other things, but that's not really the stock and trade of his success here. His success has been based upon stoking a particular kind of populist resentment, the idea that the country has been played for suckers and that there are people who are getting things that they don't deserve and that the hard working, everyday Americans are being taken advantage of by immigrants, by the Muslim population, or that their concern should be pointed in the direction of various other kind of vulnerable groups in American society. And it's ironic because what we've associated American populism with traditionally has been a kind of economic positioning. But surely that doesn't apply to Donald Trump, nor did it apply to Ross perot in the 1990s. And so I think that he's representing something that transcends the typical economic basis of populism. And I think he's really talking about something that's much more based upon a common identity. And so when he harks back to saying, as he said recently, that back in the day there'd be a time where someone disrupted a protest they'd leave on a stretcher, I think he's really recalling not simply kind of an intolerance for dissent or intolerance for protest, but he's recalling in many ways an era in which those kinds of acts could be committed with impunity. That's a kind of through line that we've seen in his candidacy, a particular kind of nostalgia, social nostalgia, in which there are people who, you know, you may feel don't really belong here or people who are not as American as you are. And those people can be dealt with in rough ways. And no one's going to question your right to do that.
- [07:36]
Evan Osnos
You described the significance of the events that happened in Chicago last week. I think any of us who were watching those protests on TV couldn't help but be reminded of 1968.
- [07:49]
Jelani Cobb
It was amazing, I thought, to see what happened that Friday night with the planned Trump rally in Chicago to begin. It was kind of inept to think that for a person who has reluctantly distance himself from the KKK and who has used every kind of signifier of racial and social paranoia available to him, that he could have a rally in a city that is grievously wounded by the killing of a teenager in a year long police cover up of it, that has in itself generated large protests and that school closures in the city have generated large protests for multiple years now, that all those things could happen and it would not be a very combustible situation. And so I think that's the first thing. And then immediately after, when people were saying that this reminded them of Chicago in 1968, and I was like, well, the difference is that in 1968, the Yippies were this outside group that was saying that the country had gone awry and it needed to be put back on the right track. Those are the people who are inside this time around. And that is, I think, the movement that Donald Trump represents.
- [09:01]
Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
America is changing and so is the world.
- [09:05]
Jelani Cobb
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [09:13]
Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [09:16]
Jelani Cobb
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [09:20]
Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [09:26]
Jelani Cobb
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [09:33]
Evan Osnos
Another question about where Trump fits into history. If you look at him today, in some ways, Jelani, he feels like a thoroughly contemporary figure to me because he is, after all, using Twitter to speak directly to his admirers. And he's got this mastery of the sort of reality show rhythm, flamboyance. And yet we also often describe him in a tradition of American demagogues that reaches back through Huey Long and George Wallace. What do you make of those comparisons?
- [09:59]
Jelani Cobb
I think they're crucial because when we look at American populism, it has had these same sorts of resonances. Populism has had very often a close association with the politics of racial and social resentment, kind of using bigotry as the lingua franca, I think, to express itself. You look at Tom Watson in the beginning of the 20th century or Huey Long and then when we get to 1948, there's a real kind of interesting point to look at, because in 1948, we saw the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, who was a kind of common man, populist supporter of civil rights, did not at all run away from his socialist associations and was running a presidential campaign really on the behalf of the everyday person who had been kind of cut out. And at the same time, that same year, we saw the emergence of the Dixiecrat Party and Strom Thurmond as their nominee for president. And he ran a very populist campaign, which was based on two things, economic justice, as they defined it, and racial segregation. And so if we fast forward, not to make too pat of an example, but we find kind of the genealogy of American populism in the Bernie Sanders campaign on the one hand, and on the other hand, in Donald Trump's campaign.
- [11:24]
Evan Osnos
Ben, what do you make of that? The idea that we've had these two parallel populist expressions, but now we're at a moment where one is faring very differently than the other. Is that because the comparison was flawed to begin with, or does it say something about the Republican Party versus the Democratic Party?
- [11:41]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think more of the latter. I was just talking to a political scientist at Berkeley who had done a kind of interesting analysis of election survey data, and on all sorts of indicators, he found that the closest correspondent to the Trump voters were Sanders voters. So, you know, both tended to be white, both tended to have less education, and then, particularly on economic issues, the two groups that were most concerned about economic inequality were not Sanders voters and Clinton voters, but Sanders voters and Trump voters. Now, there are very clear and obvious differences, and they do show up in the data. If you look at a whole range of social issues, Trump and Sanders voters are on the opposite end of the spectrum, but that there are more similarities than you would think. So one reason that populism, that this kind of expression has had more life, I guess, on the right than on the left, is that to a certain extent, it's just better incorporated into the Democratic Party. I mean, the Democratic Party has not failed to acknowledge the existence of economic inequality or tried to find some way to address it. The Republican Party has. And then there is this extra element which Jelani just described, in which there is open racism and open hatred of foreign people that is abhorrent to any large political party. So I think both for reasons of sort of ignorance and reasons of decency, the Republican Party has just done much less to incorporate that economic alienation into its party than the Democrats.
- [13:17]
Jelani Cobb
And you know what else I think is interesting here is that the kind of social resentment that conservative populism tends to get siphoned off into, it's typically encased in code words or metaphors or euphemisms. And what Donald Trump has done is strip away all that and just kind of gone his most honest and vivid language expressing those things. But at the same time, I think the economic populism of Democrats throughout the entire Cold War, no one wanted to sound like, you know, a Soviet sympathizer or anything. So I think it was much easier for a long time to make a kind of social populist argument than it was to make an economic populist argument. We've now, 20 plus years since the end of the Cold War, kind of returned to this language. I think that enough time has gone by that we could even countenance a Democratic socialist doing as well as he's done. But I don't think in earlier years this could have happened. The least inclination toward social safety net programming from Barack Obama. Obama elicited calls that he was a communist.
- [14:25]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
It's amazing at some level how much we're still talking about the collapse of the Cold War consensus. There's something to that, that both on the Republican side, where the Cold War gave a way to organize fights against government access, fights for religious liberty, all of the parts of the Republican platform, and on the Democratic side, where there was sort of a place that Democrats could not go because of the specter of the Soviet Union. It's just interesting to think about the way that the parties have moved over the last quarter century in terms of liberation from Cold War frame of mind, for better or for worse.
- [15:04]
Evan Osnos
Ben, let's shift gears for just a moment here to the other big political news of the week, of course, which is Obama's nomination of Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. Some progressives had urged Obama to use this as an occasion to promote a more diverse court by nominating perhaps someone of color or a woman. Garland is a white moderate. So how do you explain this? What was the strategy? What's the thinking that went into this choice? As far as you can tell, it's a dare.
- [15:32]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
You know, it's a dare to the Republicans. Like, if you are going to stand on principle and refuse to vote on anybody who I bring up, let me give you the most amenable nominee that you're going to get from a Democrat in a generation. And part of that is Just like optics, you know, Garland is a 63 year old white dude, but a lot more of it is personality. He's been praised many, many times by many Republican senators and by Republican legal thinkers. You know, Orrin Hatch has been quoted as saying, it would be great if Obama nominated Judge Garland, but I don't think we'll ever get that. And I think that Garland's age actually is really important here, too. A lot of the rhetoric around fights over Supreme Court nominees has to do with the kind of tactical advantage that one party is seeking. You know, they're seeking to put a radical on the court who's going to be there for 40 years. Garland is 63. There's a different feel to that than nominating somebody who's in their late 40s. And so I think in every way this is. He's just bearing Republicans to follow through.
- [16:43]
Jelani Cobb
I thought the other side of it was that people who were hoping that the president would make another pick that would diversify the court. You know, there was a counterargument that says that in the Donald Trump era Republican Party, do you really want Senate Republicans to stonewall, you know, a person of color and still try to make the argument that they're not defined by, you know, these kinds of antique racial animosities?
- [17:12]
Evan Osnos
Jelani, just one final question here. Do you get the sense as you look ahead to how this Supreme Court nominee process is going to unfold? Is it possible at all? And maybe this is unwarranted optimism that the formality of this constitutional event, the veneer of decorum of a historic moment, could in some way bring some order out of the chaos that we see out on the political stage? Or does the Supreme Court showdown become just another ring in the circus?
- [17:42]
Jelani Cobb
I don't know. I think the Republican Party is in such disarray right now that this is almost like a self inflicted wound. And the idea is that do you really want another battle going into this election, one that's not necessary? I think if there's a means by which people can get out of this while saving face, that would probably be the prudent way of approaching it. Whether or not that will happen, I kind of am on the fence.
- [18:09]
Evan Osnos
Well, we'll leave it there for today. Thanks, Jelani and Ben. Jelani Cobb and Benjamin Wallace Wells are staff writers. Ben's work has been collected in the best American political writing. And Jelani Cobb is the author of the Substance of Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. This is the political scene. This podcast is produced by Alex Barron for newyorker.com I'm Evan Osnos.
- [18:32]
Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
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- [18:34]
Evan Osnos
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Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
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- [18:42]
Evan Osnos
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- [18:46]
Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
The New Yorker is available@audible.com 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.
- [19:22]
Evan Osnos
I want a shark that that eats.
- [19:24]
Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [19:28]
Evan Osnos
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [19:36]
Asma Khalid / Tristan Redman / Katie Drummond
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 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.
- [20:07]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
From. PRX.