My friend Emily Taylor from the
newsletter (go subscribe) returns to the podcast for a rousing discussion about the fallout from the 2024 election and how we move forward in even Republican-dominated areas like my home state.
Edited excerpts from our conversation below:
EMILY: I am an optimist by nature. Studying the patriarchy, you think, “Maybe we could just not do patriarchy.” And then it’s like, oh, yeah, we’re going to keep doing that. Because I think a big part of [Kamala Harris’s] electability was because she was a woman, and of course, being a black woman, too.
I’m of two minds now. Oh well, I guess we can never nominate a woman for president. Can I say that as a women's and gender studies director? But also, I think one of the things people, especially white liberals, here are reluctant to do — understandably so — is to call out systems of oppression in communities of color. I mean I’m not saying that Harris lost because of the Black male vote, but you can see this drop off and support for women candidates. I think in 2016 we saw it, we see it again, among male voters. I think that’s kind of across the demographic spectrum. I saw that with my students, white students, students of color. I think it’s a really complicated issue that we have on our hands.
SER: Well, if it’s any consolation to you, I think [Joe] Biden was tanking with young men of all races [before he dropped out].
I’ve written about this “glass cliff” where women and minorities, especially women, tend to become the CEO of a company [during a period of crisis]. “Well, now you're the CEO of the typewriter industries company when typewriters about to go out of business.
Obviously misogyny plays a role and racism isn’t going away. But Biden was incredibly unpopular and Harris had an abbreviated campaign. How can we state that a woman can’t win if a woman has to run under the worst circumstances?
EMILY: Yeah, and electability of incumbent vice presidents too is really low. I mean, historically incumbent vice presidents very rarely win the presidency. So I'm not really sure like, what the Democratic Party was doing. I have a lot of questions. I just think it would have been really important to have had the primary system, and it’s highly possible that Harris wouldn’t have won the primary. They had moved South Carolina to be the first state, and I think for important reasons. It was kind of underhanded how they bumped South Carolina up, but South Carolina is an important place because the Democratic Party here is multiracial, multiethnic, versus in other states where it’s mostly white. So I think it would have been a really important proving ground to have had a Democratic presidential primary.
I’ve been really thinking about what this means on the ground for local politics. I think the bummer for me in South Carolina is that now that Republicans have been in control for 22 years, young people have never seen Democrats be successful at the state level here. Then with this sort of cataclysmic federal loss, they were already disillusioned with our mainstream politics. Young people, especially post-pandemic, don't trust anyone really at all. They really have lost faith in systems themselves, I think. So, how do we counter conservative politics and and fascism when the Democratic Party in the state — it’s really been re-energized in some interesting ways — but I don’t see the young people getting excited about Democrats here, even people who are liberal, right? Even the progressive young people — obviously I have a small sample size. I haven’t talked to everybody in the state, but how do you revive a party that just seems like a loser?
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What’s been the most interesting to watch here is people consistently voting against their own class interests by choosing the Republican Party. Right now, the Republicans in the state legislature, they’ve been all gung ho on their mission to eliminate the state income tax. And I’m like, “If y’all pass this bill, we’re going to lose all this federal money.” We’re the fifth highest state in receiving federal tax dollars in the country. So, a massive infusion of federal money is just going to dry up.
The school district — my kids go to Greenville County — gets $20 million of federal money a month. So the state saying, “Nah, let’s just get rid of the income tax.” It’s already very low, right? Right now their plan is a flat tax approach.
Right now the richest people in South Carolina pay 6 percent. It’s like no money to them. They want to shift it down to 4 percent and then make everybody who makes under $30,000 start paying a flat tax. It’s astounding to me to watch people who are poor and middle class in the state just cheer this anti-tax sentiment.
At some point, where does it end? Do we just have no taxes?
SER: Most likely. I don't know. But I do think to your question, having grown up in the South, growing up in working class, knowing working class people of all races, something I tell to my more liberal friends from the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, the biggest capitalists in this country are broke-ass people.
Ultimately, I think they resent the idea that you’re telling them that they’re this a fixed class because the American dream is “I’m going to work hard and either I’ll be wealthy and well off or my kids will.” And no one lies paying taxes. We might disagree with this do you do you think it’s just a communication issue for Democrats, who are struggling to with people who should be the base of the party
EMILY: I don’t think that they have actually. I think the National Democratic Party — like we saw in 2016 — has been taken over by neoliberalism, which explained the outsider status of Sanders, who I think did have the opportunity to appeal to working-class folks.
I don’t think that the Democratic Party has actually cared about the working class in a real way. It’s partially who the national Democratic Party is. It is actually run by elites and a lot of money. So it does feel a little bit like sometimes they're cosplaying a concern for class issues. Then I think that what you're talking about people adopting capitalist ideology, it wouldn’t then matter what the messaging was, right?
One thing I’ve always noticed about the South that I always saw when I came down here to visit relatives and then when i moved here in 2012 is that as soon as someone has money in the South they’re granted authority: “Oh well, they are rich so they can do what they want.” But they’re doing awful things! They’re breaking the law! But they have a pool and they wear nice clothes and drive fancy cars so they can just like do whatever they, you know, like, I don't know if you've seen that too.
In the South, there’s this concern with appearances, that you don’t see in the Northwest — how people are dressing, how their houses look, what kind of cars they’re driving. It’s this class anxiety. You want to pretend that you’re the richest that you can possibly pretend to be so that it seems like you have human value or that you're aligned with authority.
I think it’s really difficult for people in the South to separate the people being rich from people being right. So it’s really difficult to make the case, that you should criticize rich people, that you should tax the rich, right?
Why is everybody excited about lowering the richest South Carolinians? This doesn't make any sense in terms of state revenue, but it does make sense if you understand that a lot of people in the state don’t have democratic mindset, because the society has never been a fully functional representative democracy. People have never seen it actually work, right?
Sometimes it just feels like this echo of the plantocracy is still here. People can’t imagine living in a society that is based on equal representation and about people paying their fair share of what they owe to a society. There’s no sense of any sort of social fabric.
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