← We Can Do Hard Things
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
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- [00:00]
Glennon Doyle
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Abby Wambach
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- [01:27]
Rebecca Traister
Hey everybody. We're getting through, aren't we? That's what we're doing. One foot in front of the other. 2025 is looking like it might be a real doozy. And we are in it with you and we're here for you and with you. Recently our show was selected by Apple as one of their 10 shows we love and they called it a comforting support system for braving the everyday. And that is what we hope. We hope that we can help you brave the everyday. That's what you help us do. And so on Sundays, we are publishing an episode for you, one of our favorite episodes of the past four years that we've selected to be a comforting support system for all of us as we brave this new year. So in addition to our new Tuesday Thursday episodes and the ones that we're posting on Wednesday as well, please come on Sunday for some togetherness, some support, some soothing Sunday Togetherness for 2025. Thank you. We will see you there.
- [02:51]
Abby Wambach
Brittney Cooper is Professor of Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University and is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Eloquent Rage. Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York Magazine and the author of New York Times bestsellers, All the Single Ladies and and Good and Mad, as well as the award winning Big Girls Don't Cry About Gender, Race and class in the 2008 elections. Brittany and Rebecca are two of the voices we trust most in the world and we are so grateful to welcome them today. Okay, Pod Squad, it is the day after the inauguration and we are here with the only two people we can imagine being here with today. Our hope. Well, I'll tell you, it's Brittney Cooper and Rebecca Traister, I should tell you that, so you can relax a little bit. We're in good hands.
- [03:42]
Glennon Doyle
And P.S. we're recording this the day after the inauguration, right? This is going up on Thursday.
- [03:48]
Abby Wambach
So what we thought we'd ask you today, both of you, is how did you experience yesterday? What can you not stop thinking about? And then what? What is next?
- [04:06]
Brittney Cooper
Yeah, how did you experience yesterday, Traister? Cause I don't know how I experienced it.
- [04:12]
Rebecca Traister
Well, I made some conscious plans in advance, which was to be with friends. We had house guests for the weekend. I had dinner with friends last night. I texted with some people, including you, Brittany, a little bit, you know, couple groups that are text threads that are important to me and just the voices that people I trust the most, and there are tons of them. I mean, that's one of the ways I experience all of this right now, is remembering that the world is full. It's not some retreat, small club thing where just there are a few people whispering. The world is full of people who are in conversation about what to do and how to act. So I will say there were things about yesterday specifically, like I didn't expect to wake up to Cecile Richards dying on that. You know, like there were some things that were like, wow, you gird. And then there's like a kick first thing in the morning. That's not one that you saw coming that sort of throws you off. And then I didn't watch the inauguration and I didn't, you know, I read at the end of the day as I was going to bed, I read some stories about what had happened, but that was my experience of yesterday. And I want to hear what Britney's is. But very quickly I just wanna say, like, the number of things rolling around in my head that don't have easy answers right now, that are full of contradiction is huge. And I'd love to sort of talk through some of them. Here.
- [05:35]
Glennon Doyle
Awesome.
- [05:36]
Brittney Cooper
You know, I just detached fully. I watched Netflix. I had planned for it to be a rest day, which, by which I mean that I'm procrastinating from writing projects. And then some friends were like, we're gonna write. And I was like, sure, I will write today. Any other day when I need to write, I won't do it. But I was like, yes, today I will. You know, I will work on this book. Anything to just not be tempted to, like, engage the media ecosystem in any way. It just felt like it would be assaultive. And so, you know, I have taken up crafting over the last year. And so at some point, I was working on, like, a complicated crochet project that had me engrossed for a while. And I just let the, like, New York Times notifications come through to tell me, like, okay, we've officially left one regime and entered another. But that was about all that I could take. And, you know, I'm a person who, because I struggle with anxiety, don't always see myself as being cool under pressure, but I think I actually am fairly cool under pressure, so I don't freak out in the moment. And then I woke up this morning and I was like, what in the fuck? And okay. And it really wasn't actually that boisterous. I woke up in tears, which is a really hard thing to admit as a certain kind of black woman in the world, because there is still the belief that we are supposed to be strong all the time and that if you feel sad or have emotions about this, it is because you are naive, like, in thinking that it could be different or that the country was different. And why are you shocked and surprised? And it's like. But my tears weren't tears of shock or surprise. They were just deep, terrified grief over both the. The sadness of all that we lost and the terror of. The triggering terror of these months of anticipating a bad thing coming and then living through that bad thing, and then you tried to prevent it. You fought with everything you could to prevent it, and then the bad thing ended up on your doorstep anyway, and now you have to contend with it in a real way. And I just feel devastated by that. And that devastation is compounded by the fact that today is the two year anniversary of my coming back home to my place in New Jersey after burying my mother. And I remember so my world tilted on its axis two years ago, January. And I remember the feeling of defeat, because again, it's that same thing where you, you know, my mother got unexpected, had an unexpected set of complications from a surgery that just went badly. And the thing about being all us, like hyper achieving women, you know, people call us to do shit because we solve problems for a living, right? We can see around corners, right? Tracer's like one of these writers that can see around corners. She can see things coming. You know, this is like one of the things that makes you a type A personality. You anticipate and you make a plan and then you rally the troops and you get them all together. And I watched black women do that for 107 days. And I was like, okay. I don't believe in anything but a bunch of black, an army of sisters being like, we're going, we're going to be okay. And then when you show up and it's not okay, the level of, like, devastation and the sense of failure and like, how did I miss this? How did I not see it coming? It's like I woke up in the weight of all of that stuff that I had managed to sort of push at a distance yesterday. Just showed up this morning. And I struggle, I rarely struggle to get out of bed. Staying in the bed all day is not really my thing. But today I was like, I could just stay here under these sheets and in this cocoon and maybe things will be okay. And maybe I could just have like a cozy float through the next regime. So that's where I am.
- [09:54]
Abby Wambach
Brittany, thank you for that. Rebecca, what are the things that you are floating in your head that aren't landing and are contradictory to each other? When you said that, I thought of what I thought of in the shower today, that I feel like my brain is a snow globe of, like, fragments of things that are broken, and I have absolutely no idea how they're going to fall into place. So what are. What are you thinking about?
- [10:20]
Rebecca Traister
So the things that I'm like that are all knotted in my head right now are around questions of strength and weakness, long term hope and short term terror. The connections around masculinity and ideas of masculinity that were being the ideas of top down power versus bottom up power, which I think are really crucial that we empower. I'm just listing the things that in my head are like, the happening. And I think all these things apply to what I'm sorting. Oh, and these questions of something Brittany and I were talking about just before we started recording is I said, I have this weird feeling that we just have to sit through this, which doesn't mean passivity and it doesn't mean not having thoughts or conversations. Like, these and a million others and doing the work and writing and all that stuff. But there's this weird feeling of, like, this is like a display happening, or like a temper tantrum, like a toddler, you know, that, like, there's no. There's no succeeding in calming it right now. So you just have to sit through it. And, you know, you can choose how closely to pay attention to it or not, but, like, it's going to go on, and there's nothing you can do. Like, that tantrum y thing. All these things are the. Like, they're just knots in my brain that I'm, like, picking apart and trying to get into some kind of shape that makes sense. And sometimes it's in my writing. I went. My bosses at New York magazine gave me an assignment the beginning of the year to go down and cover the Hegseth confirmation, which I think was pretty brutal for me emotionally. I had a weird experience of going down. Brittany, you talked about crying. And as a white woman, I have a different relationship to tears. Mine can be used to draw a lot of response, but I will tell you that in a professional context, they're pretty embarrassing. A weird thing happened the first week. I went down to sort of talk to senators about how they were gonna game out Hegseth confirmation. I mean, you know, which is that I started. I had just, like, water coming out of my eyes. It wasn't crying. I can't describe it. I thought it was the cold. It's the winter. I was on a plane. It was dry. But, like, I was going into the Senate offices and, like, sort of completely just being like, hi, hi. Sorry, I have allergies or something. I don't know what was happening, but, like, I was in a steady state of having wet eyes and tears rolling down my cheeks, but I was not emotionally crying. And then when I came back, so I went. That first week, I wrote a story, sort of anticipatory. What are the Democrats gonna like, a beltway story? And then I went back, and I had to sit through the confirmation hearing of Pete Hegseth, where a lot of this stuff about masculinity, strength, weakness, top down, bottom up, these things that we're talking about began to rear their heads. And it was an incredibly. It was more than four hours of listening to just this incredible power play of getting this manifestly incompetent, dangerous, terrifying, menacing man through via a lot of communicative political strategizing around menace and around threat and around. Like that was happening both inside the room and outside the room, and it was deeply unpleasant. And afterwards, there was a young reporter who was in the room with me who was clearly shaken, and we talked a little bit. And then on the flight home, which was the next day, I just started to cry on the flight for no reason. There was not a conversation that preceded it. I was just on a plane to go back to my house, and I cried for the hour and 15 minutes that we were in flight with this poor guy next to me. Like, what's happening with this lady? So, anyway, there's a lot of things that I just can't stop thinking about. And I don't know if some of my tears come from my own frustration at not being able to untangle them.
- [13:47]
Abby Wambach
Yeah, yeah. Sissy, how are you? What are you thinking this morning?
- [13:54]
Brittney Cooper
I'm nervous that it's so upsetting and it's so frustrating, and it feels like you're powerless to do anything about it. And like you said, you just have to let it unfold for this period. And that there is going to be in the kind of mealy middle of us, the people who are like, I care about what's right, I care about politics. I care that there is just going to be a withdraw, a wrap yourself up and don't look at it because it's so upsetting. Like, when you're in that confirmation, you see, like, the normalization of insanity and nothing that should be okay, that we've just let things become okay over and over and over, and now things are okay. That if you would have dropped us into 10 years ago, we would have been like, what the fuck are you talking about? And now we don't bat an eye at it, and it's very offensive to our souls. And so I don't. I understand the not looking at it, and I understand the not wasting all of your energy being in reaction all the time. Like, there was one way of doing the first Trump administration where we just exhausted the fuck out of ourself for every action and equal and opposite, for every rage. Like, we were sitting at the circus and we were paying for a seat, and we can't do that. That is not a good use of energy. And then there's this other way of just being like, I have to protect myself from this madness, that I am afraid of what the future looks like. If we do that on a massive scale, those of us who can afford to look at it, who have enough emotional resources, who have enough financial resources, who can put some skin in the game, if we take all of our skin out Just reading the tea leaves of what this is like. There is a path that we are on that we have to divert off that path, or that is where the path is going.
- [16:06]
Abby Wambach
So what do we know, you two? Tell us if you can. We do know the path. One of the reasons this is so terrifying is because we know the stages we're in. We know what comes next. In some ways, based on history, we all feel like, what's next? What do we do? Based on history, what do we do? What do people who are in our positions and lanes and the resistance, the whatever you want to call it, what's next that has ever helped.
- [16:33]
Rebecca Traister
I don't want to sort of force this question on Brittany, but Brittany's work, in particular her academic work about the generation. She's one of the first people whose work I read who made me think about in real time what it is like to be born in a period where your trajectory is backward. Because we always. We tell a very neat story about the United States and forward motion in which we have just gotten freer and more equal and better, and things have gotten better, and the arc of the moral universe has bent toward justice. But we lose so much when we don't look at the periods where, in fact, things have moved exactly backwards. And Britney's academic work, which is very tied to but distinct from her contemporary political commentary, traces the generation of black women who were born in an era and whose lifetimes were. By the time they were adults, they had fewer rights and freedoms than when they were born. And so I think of that as, like, a period that is analogous to where we are right now in a very real and meaningful way. Yeah.
- [17:45]
Brittney Cooper
You know, Rebecca and I were chit chatting right before we went live today, and we were talking about this notion of, like, standing still or sitting still or just, you know, it's like when you're doing yoga and you have to breathe into the stretch, right. You have to get all the way into that tension. And it reminds me of, like, you know, I come from very Southern rural people, and when we used to have thunderstorms down south, my grandmother would say, turn off all the lights and sit down. The Lord is at work. Right. And so we weren't allowed to move around the house when. When it was thundering and lightning, there was this kind of inherent reverence for, like, we are not in charge right now. The Earth is in charge. The cosmos is in charge. And our job is to take a beat, take a right and sit and hope for a better outcome. So it is not about retreating. I don't think it's about running away. But I do think that there's. So I think a couple of things. One is that we have to learn what it means when black women and, you know, just old folks say, be still. And they would say it in the biblical sense, be still and know that I am God, however you understand God to be, however you understand the world to be organized in that way. But there's something about the stillness that brings clarity because there's all this energy, all this chaos, all of this whatever, and a lot of it is designed to make us not be able to hear ourselves think, right? And so I think that we can give ourselves. We already know. One, we've had a peek at the playbook. Two, we've had an imperial experience of the foolishness. So we already know that what they plan to do is maximum chaos and destruction. Not unlike what Rebecca said about toddlers. And I actually had a similar vision of that this morning. Rebecca, I was writing and I was like, oh, no, they're like throwing a tantrum. And when they're throwing a tantrum, what they're doing is attention seeking, right? And Trump in particular, though I'm loathe to say his name, the thing that is most true about him is that he is an attention seeker. He is a showman. The thing that he most wants is all eyes on him. So the refusal to grant him that, the ratings. I mean, this man has moved his inauguration indoors, not because of the cold, but because he knew he wasn't going to do the numbers right. One of my friends was like, let me see. A few days ago, one of my friends said, let me see if I could get a hotel room in D.C. this week, 100%. And there was plenty of availability all throughout the city. And so he knew he wasn't going to have the numbers, and so he said he was protecting the people, right? So I think that there's a thing in this moment about just the choice to be still. And then from that position, the other thing I was thinking, which is a thing that I'm working through, I was part of that generation of feminists who were like, we're throwing off our strong black woman capes. We're not doing this strong black woman shit anymore, you know, because we deserve to be vulnerable in the soft life and all of this stuff. And the thing that losing my mother has taught me is, and it is akin to the thing Rebecca said about the political work that I do is that one thing that I think we have not prepared our slightly younger forebears for is that there are some moments in American history where the soft life is not an option and where you either are strong or you die, and that is it. And that all of those black women that today, black feminists like myself and those younger than me like to look at them and say, why are they so hard? Why are they so unfeeling? Why are they so cold? Why are they impenetrable? Because that was the way that they survived. Now, do I think that that's emotionally healthy? No. Do I think that there are real consequences to that? Sure. But have I now confronted a set of circumstances in my life where my two options were, you leave your mother in this graveyard and you go forward with your life or you die here with her? There are no options in between. There. There are not. And this is the place that we are. There is not fluffiness. I am not saying we can't have gentleness and kindness and care and compassion. I am saying that whatever this version of we all want to be vulnerable, feel all our feelings everywhere, and have a world where everyone is like, look, I teach young people and the level at which they want us all to put up foam buffers around their lives so that they don't ever have to hit a hard corner is weird. And I'm like, oh, we're done with that. And so I don't know how to deal politically with the fact that I have a set of feminist principles that are all about care and softness and our right for vulnerability and our right to process our trauma. And I am like, these motherfuckers are coming for us. And when I look at the black women in the 19th century who grew up in Reconstruction, thinking, look, we're on the dawn of a new era. And then by the time they're 30, Jim Crow has set in, and they're lynching black people by the thousands, right? And they are hunting folks with dogs, and they are snatching women off the streets and raping them. And that's their literal reality. I'm not being hyperbolic. That's literally what happened, right? In a world where they had been granted rights, where the trains had been desegregated, all of that shit happened in this country in the 1860s. And then by the 1890s, it's all gone. And those women, what they did was they, like, straightened their backs, and they said, all right, then we see you. And so we don't have time for all our feelings and our musings and whatever we have to build a civil society that is going to take care of the most vulnerable. We have to continue to say that this is not the way we want the world to work. But we have to do that while we are building hospitals and schools, a health care system, a protection system, and a mode of being with each other that is going to help us to outlast this thing that seeks to destroy us. And in order to do that, first you got to work on feeling all your feelings. And then you got to recognize that there are sometimes only two options. And I hate it. I'm not saying I don't resent it. I'm not saying I don't want a different reality. But I am telling you from the depths of my own grief and journey around having to rebuild my life again that sometimes there are only two options. And those options are be strong or die. That is it. And I think that a bunch of badass women together will just figure out how to fucking be strong. Foreign.
- [24:43]
Rebecca Traister
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- [25:50]
Glennon Doyle
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- [28:30]
Abby Wambach
A queer music festival this weekend and there were 6,000 defiant, terrified, what are we going to do, people? And so we've been having those conversations as well.
- [28:41]
Glennon Doyle
Yeah, and so I've been thinking about yesterday too. Like how am I interacting with what happened and the reality of what happened, emotionally and mentally? I'm not thinking about action right now. That's not where I'm at. And it made me think a lot about the way that when I would lose a big tournament playing soccer and how I responded in the moment that the tournament was over and we've just lost and I had to look at the winners and by looking at the winners, by not turning away by not crumbling, by having some sense of humility inside of me and watching them celebrate the thing that I wanted allowed me to accept what has happened. I think that a lot of us are in this. In between. We've been in this purgatory since election day to now in this kind of quasi acceptance of what's happened, like the question of what is going to happen. And so before the actions can begin, I think that we have to genuinely accept not only what has happened, but that this is where our country is.
- [30:07]
Abby Wambach
But you used to also keep the winner's pictures on your wall because that's what pissed you off enough.
- [30:13]
Glennon Doyle
Yeah, because I mean, she used to.
- [30:15]
Abby Wambach
Put winners pictures above the locker room thing because that's the only thing that.
- [30:19]
Glennon Doyle
Guess what happens? Guess what happens when you accept what happens. Something in you changes. When you are in resistance of what has happened, then you are just like bitching and complaining about what's happened rather than accepting what's happened. And then you can move into real, authentic, true leadership in the actions.
- [30:46]
Abby Wambach
Yeah, that's the stoneness.
- [30:47]
Rebecca Traister
But this is what you just described. That the failure. I want to take this. I hope I can make this make sense. What you just described about the resistance to pretending that this thing hasn't happened, to being like, no, that can't have happened. I would say that that describes exactly where our current victors. Right. The American right. I don't even want to talk about this in partisan terms, Republicans and Democrats. I want to talk about like the American right, the ascendant, like backlash, white supremacist, hetero masculinity, blah, blah, blah, right. That whole thing, the punitive, whatever. What you just described, which was the refusing to acknowledge the victories and just complaining, whining, this was unfair. That actually describes, I mean we could do this on any kind of scale, the last 50 to 70 years of the American right. And everything that I heard in that hegseth room that I hear is actually just bitching and moaning about losses that occurred in the middle of the last century that they have never gotten over. And then they haven't actually learned how to do real leadership. Right? From like whatever you want to talk about. An actual conservative point of view, a fiscally conservative point of view, even a socially conservative point of view that isn't just mired in these people can't have won inclusion in our power. And the redistribution of power to people besides a certain set of wealthy, white, mostly male. Right. Like that is unacceptable to us and we are whining about it. And I sat there through those hearings, through the hearing last week, and just. I think that stands in for a lot of the other stuff, listening to the sort of platform that these people have come to their victory on. Okay? And it is. It is not future leadership. It is not innovation. It is fury at battles that were lost several generations ago. And that's one of the things I keep thinking about as they. You know, I listened last week to stuff about how this new. It was specific to the candidate who's going to be our secretary of defense, but it was also, obviously, more broadly about how they want to present. I heard about a warrior ethos. There are no more soldiers. They are war fighters about. And, like, the entire argument was for this question of whether this person was going to be a qualified secretary of defense, where there was no affirmative argument to be made about him. Truly. Like, you can, you know, you could look at somebody like Brett Kavanaugh, who should never have been confirmed to the Supreme Court and been like, well, at least he understands law. I mean, you know, like, badly. Like, there's no. Like, Pete Hegseth. Well, he's really good at this. There's literally no argument for him. And so the argument that was being made was that he loved Jesus and that he hated dei, and that was the entirety of his confirmation hearing. But that was really instructive, because it was. Every argument that was made for this guy was actually an argument against inclusion, against racial equality, against gender equality, against ways of looking at the world that had in any way diminished the power of the kind of person who'd had power throughout this country's history. And so that thing that you just described about the inability to acknowledge the victor, I think begins here with the right. And they have just extracted a victory and a real victory. And I want to also heed your advice and say, right, they won. And I think that's sort of what we're talking about, which is like, let's sit and look. Let's sit and look at what this victory looks like.
- [34:25]
Brittney Cooper
Can I jump in and say, one of the ways that I think that people can accept this better is to do what I did on my birthday, which is that I went to a rage room, and in that rage room, there was a picture of Trump's face on the wall, and I was given a crate of glass objects that I could throw at said wall and a container of metal bats and about 20 minutes and a soundtrack of my choosing. And so I just wailed for 20 minutes. I broke shit. I threw it at the Walls. I had my own contain temper tantrum. And I know that's not what y'all expected me to say, but listen, because this is rage inducing. And then you roll around and you carry it in your body and you don't have any way to get it out. And I think the thing is that we have been provoked, mistreated, and we're going to be mistreated even more. So if there's the, like, how do I not complain? What do I do with all of my frustration and my anger? It is like, find a healthy way to actually go and take it out in a more contained space. Because what we are living through is a world where white people are not. Not the lovely white folks here. Not that I need to say that, but. But the white folk in the aggregate who voted for this are like, you know, I think. Let me say it in an even more specific framework. We still didn't manage in this election to, like, win white women over. Now the college educated white girls actually did better. And I want to acknowledge that because I think that's significant. And I'm like, okay, y'all got it. Y'all just need to organize your people a little bit more. So there's that. But I was like, why would white women keep voting for this while they're also, like, bleeding out in parking lots? Like, why would they keep doing it? But I realized that some of it is because their whole view of their identity and value in a system where they don't have money or power, but they have proximity to those things is they've got to be able to pass on a world to their sons that was like the world of their fathers and their husbands. White women have been told that to be a success as a white woman is to pass on a world where your white sons can be rich, can be powerful, can be at the top of the heap, and that your daughters will have these kind of men to marry. Like, it's very heteronorm. I mean, I ain't even thinking about queer folks at all. But it is literally to secure property, money and power for white boys and teach them how to rule the world so that then they can just continue to reproduce themselves, that's their emotional investment in it then. So when this masculinity, this violent masculinity that Rebecca's talking about. I love Jesus, right? And I hate dei, what that converges in for white women is. And in order for you not to be a failure to the race and not to be a failure as a woman, your job is to secure a set of conditions for your sons to be ascendant and for your daughters to just reproduce that ascendancy over and over again from generation to generation, right? So that is the world that they're trying to get back to is a world where white ascendancy was guaranteed. And their fight over the 50s and 60s is a fight about that. And so the thing that I also then came to around this is that does devastate me, and I think this is the best way to say it. I wrote this essay this morning at the substack I run with my feminist collective, with the crunk feminist collective. And I said, oh, the 20th century project is dead. That's what these. In their desire to resuscitate the 50s and 60s, these folks are saying, we want to resuscitate the great American century. But what they have actually done is killed the things that were solidly good about the 20th century, right? All of the civil rights legislation that we get in, these people, literally with the swipe of a pen and a rogue Supreme Court, they have literally killed it. Their plan was to kill the project of the 20th century in this quarter century into the 21st century. And for young people listening, you know how y'all are always like, you know, because the 1900s, right? Would takes me out every time they say it, right? Young people talk about the 1900s like we talk about the 1800s. And so these people are like, the 1900s, you know, when y'all used to do all this kind of stuff. These folks have come along to kill the 1900s, right? And to say that all of the things that actually made America, that won the American century, it wasn't just that we were a world superpower and a military superpower after World War II. It was also that when we then had the upheavals of civil rights and black power, to a certain extent, we were able to assimilate some of the lessons and make space for the emergence of a black political class, a black professional class, some measure of integration. Now, a lot of that stuff gets pushed back even before we leave the 20th century. But you can see an appreciable difference in the second half of the 20th century that you'd seen in any other time of the nation's history. And what this essentially did yesterday was to say that that project is dead. And one of the things that's going to be really hard for those of us who are over the age of 25 is that we have lived in a world where that project, and particularly the more Progressive parts of it have shaped our idea of the possible. And now all of it is gone away. And so we have to have some new idea of the possible. And we don't have a 21st century version of the possible beyond Barack Obama. And I would say that quite frankly, he's really just evidence of the long 20th century. I don't even know if his story fully belongs to the 21st century. And I know I'm being super like wonky and academic or whatever, but I'm really just trying to say that these folks have killed effectively the parts of the 20th century that those of us who were progressive minded are proud of. Like that when we're confronted as a country with the bad parts of ourselves, we're willing to try to use our systems to make them better. These guys have said we don't want to do that anymore.
- [40:40]
Rebecca Traister
Here's where the hope, and possibly a naive hope and also one that does not want to diminish. This is what I was saying at the very beginning about long term optimism, maybe a stretch, but long term hope versus short term terror and eyes open reckoning with reality. Okay, and this is what I'm going to try to balance here because I think Britney's. This is where we're sort of talking about the same thing, which is what is clearly what these victors are doing when I say that they were unable to accept the defeats of the mid 20th century. This is exactly what I'm talking about. So they are gonna come and they're gonna beat them. And all the language, man, all the language. This is again, I'm in hegseth world. But the torture is akin to the rape. We now have affirmative action for rapists in this administration. And everybody. We only hire men who've sexually assaulted people.
- [41:31]
Brittney Cooper
Right.
- [41:31]
Rebecca Traister
This is like a job requirement in the Trump administration. Right, but think about what this has in common. The assertion of brute force over bodies that you want to dominate and you want to make a public show of dominating. Right? So this is rape. This is the defense of torture. This is the. It's, it's the attack on education.
- [41:52]
Brittney Cooper
It's the bringing back the death penalty yesterday.
- [41:55]
Rebecca Traister
Yeah.
- [41:56]
Brittney Cooper
It's mandating the death penalty against immigrants who have commit crimes.
- [42:00]
Rebecca Traister
It is deportation. It is declaring there are only two genders. We're gonna do this from the top down, literally. And we are gonna overpower you physically. We're gonna assert our rights to your bodies. Okay? In a million ways. You're talking about trans identities, you're talking about reproductive realities. You're talking about incarceration, death penalty, torture, right? This is like we are going to dominate your bodies, all right? And so that is what's happening. And I do not want, when I, when I say anything that is forward looking and optimistic, I do not want to take away from the brutal lived reality of this is going to be deportation, family separation, all these things in front of us now, right now. I also want to say that Britney's. The history of what happens in the middle of the 19th century is we have a very violent war and the sort of culmination of generations worth of activism on multiple fronts over periods of well more than a century, extracting certain liberties and certain victories from a government and a system that was designed around oppressions. And then you have the rollback of those. The end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, the violent rollback, the assertion of brute force and punitive power over the bodies that had extracted certain kinds of liberties and victories, not complete ones, but you have the violent pushing of them back into boxes, you know, and it's not, this isn't clean. They're not clean dates, right. You know, they're not clean victories by any stretch. You know, you have emancipation, you have the 19th amendment. Not until the beginning of the 20th century. And even then it's engaged, incomplete because it does not cover black women who are already among those black people who gained the right to vote but couldn't because of Jim Crow.
- [43:55]
Brittney Cooper
Right.
- [43:55]
Rebecca Traister
It's not clean like Britney was saying, but these are fuzzy borders. And then out of that, that brutal reassertion of power over bodies that those at the top did not want to have, participating in realms where they'd been previously excluded. Out of that comes the reassertion of that drive, that need, that fight from the bottom to say, actually those victories that you tried to kill from the last century and that you did, right? Like Brittany's saying and like what we're acknowledging, no, that's not the end of the story. You don't just get the past back without any view that there's gonna be a future and that there's gonna be a future of these people at the bottom who have a will and have had a ra began with people whose bodies were forcibly taken, raped, put to work, had no rights, had no voice, had no acknowledgement as full humans could extract liberty horribly, horribly. That people who had no votes could extract votes. That people who had no rights to bodily autonomy could extract some legal protections for bodily autonomy. That has happened, but it's also had to Happen multiple times. Right? And that's the important thing. And so where does that situate us? It's really important. That's the long term versus the short term. It is really important to note that those women who Brittany talks about who stiffen their spines, right? In ways that we would prefer that we did not have to do that. The stiffening of the spines was like, nope, we have to do this process again. But that it has been done not just in the last century, but the century before that, and it has been taken back. And part of what I watch when I have been still, as we talked about at the beginning of this, when I have just been sitting through it, tuning some of it out, but also not really tuning it out, I am watching the displays, like the victory displays, the rolling around in macho white masculinist brutality, grotesque, the rolling around of people who are behaving through their, like, peacocking around their domination and brutal possibilities. They are behaving like people who aren't scared of anything. But I believe they're behaving that way because they're terrified and they want the people at the bottom to think that there's no hope. They want everybody, right? They're like threatening Republican politicians, like Republican senators. It's working. They're saying, Elon Musk is going to point his money cannon at you if you challenge this Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk, like all these, this oligarchy, whatever, like, we will destroy you. We'll just destroy you. We'll destroy your political career. We'll take you out. There's for civilians, like, there's that primary threat for actual Republican, hard right Republican politicians who would do anything to complicate their agenda. For civilians, it's much worse. We'll dox you, will threaten you, we'll put you in jail, you know, like the revenge list, all that stuff, right? You can't do anything. But why are they doing that? Why are they behaving that way? A party that actually is secure, a party party and an ideology that is actually secure in its idea, that is fulfilling the will of the people, isn't so scared of the people. They're trying to dominate the people because they're terrified of what the people actually want. And they're behaving like they have a mandate, which they do not have. Right? Remember? And this is not resisting the victory. I want to promise this is not resisting the victory, but it is pointing out they won, they really won through what was an electoral college landslide. It is also true that they won with less than half of the electorate support. And they're behaving like that is not the case.
- [48:00]
Abby Wambach
That's true.
- [48:01]
Rebecca Traister
So think about what those dynamics mean moving forward.
- [48:06]
Brittney Cooper
Yep.
- [48:17]
Abby Wambach
We have a very exciting trip coming up.
- [48:19]
Glennon Doyle
Oh, I can't wait.
- [48:20]
Abby Wambach
Pod Squad. We are going to stay in Park City in a big house with all of the people who we worked with to produce Andrew Gibson's documentary, which is called Come See Me in the Good Light. Okay. So we've been working on this documentary all year and it's going to Sundance. Yay. Yay. And we all wanted to stay together. And so Abby and I found this big, beautiful house that all the. I mean, I think it's pretty much all lesbians. Mostly all lesbians. It's gonna be a very gay, cozy house. We all want to have our own spaces, but we all wanna feel connected.
- [48:55]
Glennon Doyle
Yeah.
- [48:55]
Abby Wambach
So we went with Airbnb. If you're traveling with family or friends this winter like we are, consider an Airbnb. Those extra rooms and a full kitchen make all the difference. And if you're going solo, you can still find a place that feels like your own little sanctuary no matter where you are. So next time you're planning a winter getaway, give Airbnb a try. Trust me, it's an experience you won't regret.
- [49:17]
Rebecca Traister
I want to tell you about Alma. Working with a skilled therapist can undoubtedly be life changing. It has been for me. But therapists are not one size fits all. Finding the right therapist seems to have like a six month waiting list and it feels like 90% of those don't take insurance, much less your insurance. This is why I'm so psyched to talk to you about Alma. They exist to remove this barrier that makes it near impossible to find an affordable, available, high quality therapist. You can search therapists who not only take insurance, but take your insurance. They offer free 15 minute consultations so you can find a therapist who works for you without any pressure. 83% of people seeing a therapist through Alma say their current therapist is the right fit for them. Better with people, better with Alma. Visit hello Alma.comhard things to get started and schedule a free consultation today. That's hello a lma.com h a r D T H I N G S.
- [50:30]
Brittney Cooper
Everything you're saying is not only are they terrified now and therefore have to squash any resistance because it's there. They only exist. They only exist because they're terror of the will of the people. The same reason that Jim Crow only existed because of the threat of liberty of people who are not enslaved anymore. That only exists in opposition to the power that could be asserted by the people to whom it belongs. Right? And so that for me, I'm wondering if this moment of pause is for us all to take a fucking breath and go backward instead of trying to just drowned in the whirlpool of whatever the future is like. We need to know our history. We need to know the way that this has happened time and time and time again. Because for many of us, and I am speaking to white women who are new to the fray, we think that this is the first time this has ever fucking happened. We think that this is the first time that anyone has had fewer rights than they had before.
- [51:52]
Abby Wambach
We literally call it unprecedented times every day.
- [51:56]
Brittney Cooper
So and that is important. This is why they're banning books. This is why critical race theory doesn't exist in places. It is because if we knew that this is not shocking, this is not unprecedented. This is not a big scary man doing a new thing. This is the way of the fucking world is that the people come, the tyrants come in, they're threatened by progress. They clamp down on it, band together, they hold on, they link arms and they keep walking forward. If we knew that, if we looked at the lessons of the past, of the strong black women, of the civil rights leaders, of the Fannie Lou Hamers, of the Reverend King, like, we would see that. We think we're disappointed.
- [52:49]
Abby Wambach
Yeah, it feels directional.
- [52:51]
Brittney Cooper
And it's not just like white women also have a history of having to be stalwart. Those first wave white ladies, those suffragists, Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Listen, I'm not saying they didn't have some problematic, you know, racial politics or whatever, but the part of me that's still like a Gilmore Girls girl is like, okay, but I still recognize badass boss bitches in any century, I do. And you get to claim these people and disagree with the parts that didn't work. So it took them 75 years, basically, from 1848, Seneca Falls to 1920. Like, we're talking about a history that happens in 75 year cycles, which means that we're kind of right on schedule.
- [53:33]
Abby Wambach
Right?
- [53:34]
Rebecca Traister
Speaking of my own industry, which I feel a little alienated from right now. More than a little alienated from right now. Especially around the way political commentary is working. And there are some examples about media caving. Like, talk about a news industry making it easier for these kinds of scare tactics to work and depress any kind of even storytelling, like accurate Storytelling is the sort of caving on these lawsuits, making it so that these people can sue media organizations anyway. That's a whole other story. But I also want to talk about just the nature of how the media tends to cover like this is a political story, you know, because we know that there's a tendency for political media to treat everything as a distant game, a horse race, literally, whether we're in an election cycle or not. Like a who's winning, who's losing every day. And I want to speak to what Brittany just said about these 75 year cycles, right. You know, one of these facts that gets lost, that there's only one person who lived from 1848 to vote, like, who was at the Seneca Falls convention.
- [54:35]
Brittney Cooper
Oh, wow.
- [54:35]
Rebecca Traister
There's one person who was still alive to cast a vote. One woman who was alive to cast a vote after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. She was a child who was at Seneca Falls, had her name. And I don't have it now, but think about what that means generationally, right? And so you're gonna see I already. Resistance has collapsed. Right? This is one of my least favorite things happening in the media right now is this notion we're sitting here talking about, pausing, resting, sitting still, listening, watching, right. Not behaving the way we did. But I wanna be real clear about something. The storyline that the resistance failed last time. First of all, what is the resistance? Is it the guys like in the Mueller time T shirts or is it people who were running for office and fundamentally changed the Democratic Party, honestly, like is the most crucial infusion of new blood and a new generation into the Democratic Party of our lifetimes, which is a process that needs to continue and is continuing. We've seen, you know, run for something, which is the tremendous organization that trains first time candidates to run for office, had record number of signups in the weeks after the election in November. So this idea that there's just like a deadness and a passivity is not accurate. Secondly, this question of the resistance failed, is it because Trump wasn't put in jail, because he wasn't impeached? Because the things, the systems that certain people believed were gonna save them, in fact didn't save them. Okay, but that's different from saying that resistance in his first administration failed because during his first administration you had a record breaking 2018, where you did have this infusion of new energy, where you had aoc, you had the squad, just it changed the face of American politics and was the biggest blue wave since the Nixon administration. That same year you had the defeat of the attempt to overturn the aca, which was because people on the ground went and terrified their local Republican representatives and got them to vote against ACA repeal. You had me too, in which really powerful, abusive people lost their jobs and their continued ability to abuse with impunity. You have seen one abortion referendum after another be won by the forces that these guys want to suppress. And yet they have won, including in red states. So I want to first of all tell everybody to question this notion that the resistance didn't work last year like their last time around. That's not a true story. Secondly, with that view to that 75 year cycle, right, that we are talking in centuries about forward motion and pushback and forward motion and pushback, I want everybody listening to question every time they hear political media tell them that this is just not the same as last time. There's not the same spirit of resistance. Okay? This is not a problem that is gonna be solved this week with a march. And the fact that this is not a problem that's gonna be solved because a person is yelling. Especially when the other thing you're telling us is that the last time when people yelled, it didn't do anything, right? So these are part of the reason that you pause, that you take a breath, that you breathe into the stretch is to prepare for something far longer term work that you can't have the expectation is going to be finished in a week or this term or this administration or this lifetime, you know, but that doesn't mean that you're like, this is the next generation's problem either. And so it's that balancing of how do you think about time and work and effort and who's in coalition with you and what is the work to be done together.
- [58:19]
Abby Wambach
Is there anything else that you want to leave us with before we stop and you go on to your next important moment?
- [58:27]
Brittney Cooper
The thing I want to tell people is this is the time to build good, solid local relationships. This is the time to join orgs. I have, you know, taken up crocheting. I was never arts and crafts girl. It's very weird even to myself. But I have been delighted by all this stuff that I'm doing with yarn. And so I've just gone ahead and leaned into it. So I have been finding local crafting spaces and circles and conferences and all kinds of things to go to, mostly because it's a low stakes way to be in community. So whether it's, you know, starting a book club or going to learn archery or taking up Ax throwing or whatever. I'm partly saying get a hobby because there has got to be something that your hands are doing that are not doom scrolling. But also the way that we're going to be able to figure out what is true in a world where the media has abandoned us and the government has abandoned us is that we've got to be in community with people so that we can build real deep and solid relationships so that there are people to come to our rescue, people to bounce ideas off of, people to be a resource well for us so that we can connect with each other. And so even though I know we're in the era of the hyper digital and AI, we are also in this era where going back into local space, even recognizing that some of the running that you might want to do in government is for the school board, is for the city council, it's for the planning, planning or zoning board. Right? Go be part of the volunteer firefighters, any number of local orgs. These are the places where we are going to be able to have impact. These are the places where we're going to be able to be in community. These are the places where we're going to be able to be in power. And I say that as a person who is largely an introvert. You know, I'm a social extrovert in terms of like my work and all of that. But I'm not necessarily like a make a lot of new friends person. I have my kind of trusted circle. But being connected in community is the way that this is going to feel less apocalyptic. And so allow yourself the benefit of that new energy. Allow yourself to imagine that there might be some interests that you haven't imagined that you can take up. And the thing is, we're all very busy people. So as you can imagine, I too am busy. So I know you're wondering, well, where do you get all these time for hobbies? I schedule it in the same way that I schedule in work meetings and every other thing. And so then I just be like, look, it's already on the schedule, I got to do it, I paid for this class, it's whatever. So that is my like non political political way of like sustaining yourself is build community with people. And it is really hard for adults to make friends, hard to make adult friends. But maybe you won't make a bunch of new deep friends. But maybe you'll make a bunch of like social acquaintances in your community and that really matters.
- [61:16]
Abby Wambach
I love that. It's like busting out of the. I feel so directionally frozen at the moment, I feel. I don't know how to describe it other than that, like, my brain's not connecting everything like you said, Rebecca. But when we were at the festival this weekend with all of these scared people, I had this directional desire to just turn back and, like, protect and embrace, which feels a little bit dangerous to me. It feels like a little too maternal, a little too, like, the version of, like, activist, trad wife. Like, wrong. I want that, but I actually have to straighten my spine and keep leading those. But you're also presenting an idea of sometimes, maybe in this moment, neither backwards nor forwards, but outwards. Getting out of the directional binary community is not backwards nor forwards, it's this other direction. Rebecca, please go and let me put.
- [62:12]
Rebecca Traister
In a plug for inwards too. Right. Because, I mean, and this is. You know, Brittany and I basically were on a rage tour during the last administration. We both had books about women's rage.
- [62:22]
Abby Wambach
Yes.
- [62:22]
Rebecca Traister
And we often were speaking together, and I think both of us got asked a lot versions of, what can I do? Maybe I got it more because often white women were my audience, and a lot of them were newer to wanting to do something to begin with. And so it was like, what can I do? I'm not a protest person, or what can I do? And a thing I used to say to them that this conversation has reminded me of is like, there is not one model at all. And it's not just, this is not a comforting thing. This is an energizing thing. Fuck, no. There's no one model. If everybody just liked to go to protests and felt that we wouldn't get anything done. You don't get anything done by just protesting. Right. And if everybody just wanted to run for office, that would.
- [63:08]
Brittney Cooper
Right.
- [63:08]
Rebecca Traister
So you should think well beyond it might be finding a social circle that brings you in contact with new people with whom you're not going there to secretly infiltrate it to then talk about politics. But in fact, if you find that you share interests and humanity, it becomes more available to extend through social connection, expand your own personal moral universe. Right. And have conversations that might not be had otherwise, whether. Whether it's crocheting or gardening or whatever. But there's also this inward thing that we've touched on before. What about getting the kinds of education that they would prefer that we not get? So a thing I used to regularly tell people who were like, I don't know. I'm not good with people. I don't knock doors. It's like, go to a library. Right? Go find some of this history in my book, I wrote a ton about history that I did not know as a very expensively educated person with a strong background in history and feminism and anti racism. There is history of how people in these other generations that we've been talking about today and in other periods of regress, how they worked, how they built coalitions, how they existed in the world, how they fought, and more than anything, that long view of history and understanding. Yes, we have been here before. We have been in places like this and generations before us because of their willingness to think creatively and connectively with other people, to talk about inequity, injustice, and to find a mode of fighting that made sense and a way to stiffen their own spines when it felt impossible. They enabled us to get here. They enabled the victories that these people are now trying to and succeeding. In many cases. It's snatching away from us and they do not. That is why they're banning books. That is why they're attacking universities. They do not want the people to understand that there are millions of paths forward for us still. So even if you do not want to be extroverted in the world, it is a mode of resistance to go and read the books they don't want you to read, to go and learn about the past that they would prefer you not learn about. And that's a very introverted path forward too.
- [65:36]
Glennon Doyle
It's good. Wow.
- [65:39]
Abby Wambach
Well, there are people that when I feel frozen and uncertain and afraid that even just the remembering of their existence out there helps me to straighten my spine. And you too are two of those people. And so I know that I speak for thousands and thousands of us when I just say thank you.
- [66:02]
Brittney Cooper
Thank you, thank you.
- [66:03]
Rebecca Traister
Thank you so much.
- [66:04]
Abby Wambach
POD Squad. We Can Do Hard Things. And we will see you next time if this podcast means something to you. It would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30, 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the POD helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey or wherever you listen to podcasts and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right hand corner or click on Follow.
- [66:49]
Brittney Cooper
Follow.
- [66:50]
Abby Wambach
This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five star rating and review and share an episode, you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Legrasso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner and Bill Schultz.