Noah Berlatsky from
joins me to discuss why Democrats and Republicans have very different reactions to election losses, and the intentional structural advantages that let Republicans feel free to raise their fascist flag high.Later, we touch on last weekend’s anti-semitic attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family.
SER: Last week, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer walked into a political rake when she [met with Donald Trump,] who predictably used her as a bipartisan prop. She tried to hide her face from the public photo session, and my beloved Streisand Effect was definitely in play because that image is now everywhere.
There was a lot of people defending why she had to do what she did, and the whole time I’m thinking about how there’s no way Kristi Noem as governor would have met with President Kamala Harris under any circumstances. And if you're talking about swing states, Brian Kemp, when Biden flips Georgia, all the Senate seats flipped by Democrats — he does not immediately start becoming Biden’s best friend even though he’s up for reelection in two years. He actually does quite the opposite and continues catering to the base.
I was trying to figure out what is going on, and I remembered a piece you’d written last month in March that really stood out to me about why it seems that Democrats and Republicans respond to electoral defeats differently.
So Noah, do you mind explaining your piece a bit and your theory there?
NOAH: Sure. So I was responding to a piece earlier, by Seth Masket, a political scientist who I like a lot. He does a lot of research on Republicans, and he was pointing out that Republicans and Democrats respond to election losses very differently. When Republicans lose, especially recently, they kind of say, “Well, we were cheated.” They don’t say, “Oh, we did something wrong, right?”
They say, “We were cheated” or, at best, “things just went against us” and they continued. They kind of doubled down. They’re like, well, we need to be more radical even.
Whereas when Democrats lose, it’s like this existential [crisis.] “Oh my god, we need to abandon the base. We need to appeal more to the center. We need to get rid of these progressive policy goals, etc, etc.”
Masket was saying that this is a really bad dynamic in the sense that, especially when you’re dealing with a fascist party, basically whoever wins, people say, “Well, we need to be more fascist.”
I think he’s right about how that works, and I was sort of thinking about why that dynamic is in place. I think there are two reasons. The first is that the election landscape is really tilted towards Republicans, especially in the Senate, where you have these big states with not very many people in them … very rural white states with small populations and that creates a huge tilt in the Senate towards Republicans who to do better with rural white voters — with white voters in general but with rural white voters in particular. You have that problem with the Electoral College, too, which is tilted more towards Republicans, at least at the moment. That’s less of a permanent issue, but it’s been the case for the last few cycles.
And even in the House, Democrats are more located in cities and that makes them much easier to gerrymand, so there’s a slight advantage [for Republicans ]there as well.
There’s just in general this big tilt towards Republicans in our electoral system, which means that Republicans can be very radical and still nominate people who are completely useless or have no experience or are obviously radical and they can still win a decent amount of the time.
So, that encourages them to just keep being radical because they don’t suffer a huge electoral deficit from it. Where on the other hand, Democrats are, have to compete in very conservative states, much more conservative than the electorate, as a whole. If you’ve got to win West Virginia or even Arizona, right, you need to prioritize basically white centrists and even win some white conservatives.
So that’s the first thing. There’s kind of this empirical reality, which sort of makes the median voter more conservative and that affects how Democrats couch their policies. And the other thing is that, we live in a white supremacist racist society and, across the political spectrum, people see the “most authentic voter” as these rural white conservatives.
You saw that after Trump was elected when there was all these, “oh, we need to go to white rural diners and talk to real Americans” [stories.] But you also see it, whenever Democrats lose: “We need to recapture the white working class vote!” There’s this idea that these white voters are the most authentic, are the most real.
That creates this ideological feeling that when you lose, the real problem is that you’re losing those voters and that other voters’ interests are less important. I think those two things intertwine. You’ve got this system that prioritizes rural white voters. You have this ideological presumption that those voters are the most authentic and the most important. That creates a powerful incentive to try to appeal to those voters and to see whoever they vote for as legitimate and important and as the real voice of America.
Of course, those people voted for Trump this time out and have been more and more enthusiastic about Trump. So Democrats are reluctant to just come out and say, “Trump’s a fascist.”
There’s really nothing there that you can really negotiate with or work with. He’s not embodying real economic anxieties. He’s a fascist racist. He’s a bad guy, and if you try to negotiate with him or try to say, “Well, he’s right about this and that,” you just end up legitimizing horrible things and embarrassing yourself, which is what Whitmer did.
Trump weaponizing anti-Semitism.
NOAH: [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro’s home got lit on fire by someone over Passover. There’s still an investigation but the guy who they think did it at the moment was a right-wing yahoo, anti-Biden sort.
SER: I hate to say that Democrats should try to “exploit” these things, but it was a huge story when anything like this even remotely would happen to a Republican. I think this is relevant.
It also speaks to the fact that Trump is not interested in stopping true anti-Semitism.I think this will be able to put the to Trump’s arguments because he’s using Jewish people, weaponizing anti-Semitism to impose fascism. Essentially, the U.S. government is justifying disappearing people under the pretense of protecting Jewish people
NOAH: It sucks. It’s really bad. It’s worst for the people who are targeted, and of course, for Palestinians in the U.S. and in Gaza, it’s just been a nightmare.
But yeah, it’s really horrible. The thing that really gets me is the extent to which some Jewish people are on board with it. I know liberal Zionists who really seem to think that like Columbia is the biggest threat to Jewish people since Hitler, which is nuts. It’s just students protesting, even if they say stuff you really don’t like. Even if occasionally they say anti-Semitic stuff, right?
Protesters do occasionally say anti-Semitic things, but even if that’s the case, letting charges of anti-semitism be used to destroy universities, to target people for kidnapping with basically no charges and then sending them to foreign torture prisons for life — when do these people get out? — this is just a horrific misuse of Jewish history and Jewish identity. It’s just evil.
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