Everyone is in a tizzy.
That is my official diagnosis of the post-election hangover in my world. My phone is full of text messages from people I haven’t heard from in years, looking for commiseration. I taught my first class a week after the election and it took an hour for my students to process enough grief so that we could talk about cheerier topics like the high price of telecommunications in American prisons. I’m aware that a big part of America is living its wildest dreams. But in my corner of the world, one big question lingers: How did we get here?
The long and the short of it is that circumstance and history forced Kamala Harris, a potential change candidate, to run as an incumbent during a global anti-incumbency, pro-authoritarian political wave. The only surprise here is that anyone expected the United States to be exceptional by bucking the global headwinds that favored a conservative populist.
Those headwinds helped Donald Trump grow his support among young voters, Latino men and Black men, among others. For as long as I have been eligible to vote, the line on the G.O.P. has been that it is old, white and boring. Trump’s appeal with young people refutes that as much as his success with nonwhite men does.
Trump did not win over these minority and young voters because he figured out how to appeal to their identity. He excelled at tapping into the information ecosystems — social media, memes and the cultish language of overlapping digital communities — where minority and young voters express their identity. That is a meaningful difference. Trump’s rhetoric and agenda may appeal to some voters based on racial identity, but the bigger story of Trumpism is how economic polarization is scrambling and complicating identity politics, especially in online spaces.
Trump’s political strengths are well documented. He is loud and bombastic. He is illiberal and rude. These characteristics make it easy for liberals to dismiss his demonstrably effective ability to generate affect. He encourages his supporters to lean into their feelings — to feel seen, acknowledged, welcome. That affect is politically powerful, especially in the digital age.
There is a growing body of social science research about the emotionally evocative digital cultures that circulate a lot of nonsense ideas and sell a lot of junk to create influencers. That potent mix of money, influence and emotion was key to the mass proliferation of two ideas that Trump’s brand of politics has brilliantly translated into electoral success: men and women are natural categories, and he can bring back the post-World War II economy.
If you are looking to understand Donald Trump’s unusual hold on our cultural politics, look to the tradwives, podcast bros and wellness influencers.
Tradwives are the social-media generation’s iteration of the 1950s white, suburban, middle-class housewife. They glorify domestic labor and the wealth that makes a single-income nuclear family seem like a respite from the paid labor market for women. With clear, if implicit, echoes of the Make America Great Again movement, a big part of the fantasy tradwives sell is that women can once again enjoy the trappings of upper-class consumption without the dangerous density of urban life or the hard labor of rural life.
The idyllic, impeccably groomed stay-at-home mom is an enduring symbol of the 1950s economy. It is also a fairy tale. As numerous feminist texts have detailed, the few women who did have access to that life were often miserable.
But, if the economics of the traditional, gendered division of labor ever worked for a few, it works for even fewer families today. Being a tradwife in this economy is a cruel capitalist fantasy because it is so unattainable; to survive, most families need two incomes. But there is a market for making the fantasy an aspirational commodity if people can buy it. Tradwife lore promises that consumers can retcon the 21st-century economy into a fantasy of the mid-20th-century economy. All you have to do is buy the right skin care product or mill your own flour for homemade bread.
In “The Women of the Far Right,” Eviane Leidig describes what she calls “far-right entrepreneurism,” a sprawling market of far-right, influencer-promoted goods that make a profit and slowly acculturate people to extremism. Tradwives are the elite vanguard of this economy. They peddle “clean” beauty serums that promise youthful skin and the moral virtue of cleanliness. In the tradwife’s world, a suitable woman manages her body like she manages her home, with performative cleaning. Tradwives offer courses to teach other women how to embrace the idea that men are vehicles to economic security, couching ideas about male breadwinners in lifestyle content branded as “feminine leisure” or “stay-at-home girlfriends.”
And, of course, few things in pop culture prepared our palate for Trump more than the endless parade of housewife reality TV programming. After you watch a few thousand hours of competitive wifedom that is scored in creative insults, Trump might sound crass, but he won’t necessarily sound offensive. More important, he is promising exactly what your favorite tradwife promises — that you can buy or vote your way back to the economic Shangri-La of post-World War II America.
The podcast bros, the masculine twin of tradwives, deserve an entire library wing. There is no doubt that the podcast ecosystem is now a thriving information environment with its own rules about legitimacy, ethics and audience. The crude economics of the medium defines it. You get paid if you get popular, you get popular if you are already famous.
Joe Rogan is the podcast bros’ patron saint, and his brand of infotainment helped create the podcast bro playbook. To be a podcast bro you generally must be marginally famous for some inscrutable reason, make contrarian ideas out to be intellectualism and promote yourself as an “independent thinker” while booking attention-grabbing, politically extreme guests. Then you can monetize your show, looking entrepreneurial by selling a range of junk goods that cozy up to disinformation about vaccines, health, fitness and investing.
To be sure, all podcast bros aren’t Republicans or even conservatives. But this isn’t about how people identify politically. This is about the politics on which the podcast bro brand is modeled. Even left-leaning and center-left podcast bros have the same aesthetics as right-wing bombastic podcasters. If you tune out their words (and who among us doesn’t tune out when listening to a podcast) you are still consuming the cadence and texture of the podcast bro style. If the patter of “Fresh Air” sounds like liberalism, the podcast bro sounds like reactionarism.
When Trump talks, he often sounds like a podcast bro — rambling between ideas, transgressing bounds of propriety, offering dog whistles coded as jokes. When he is looped constantly on television news, that sort of speech starts to sound like the news to a lot of listeners. That is pivotal to how so many wacky conspiracy theories are reality washed. They sound as reasonable and newsy as the character spewing them, once that character makes the podcast bro aesthetic sound legitimate.
The cultural politics of the podcast bro phenomenon is built on gender identity. This is a place where men can be men, with a clear unifying political aesthetic: Be provocative, be brash and be unapologetically male. By mirroring these bros’ speech and appearing on their shows, Trump was able to attach himself to their ideas about masculinity while crafting a media environment in which his biggest lies could find a political audience.
Then there are the wellness influencers. They sell diets and lifestyles that make our bodies into secular religions. If I do any more mindful, radical self-care, I am going to exfoliate myself into not existing. Maybe that’s the point — for people like me to disappear. The historian Kathleen Belew calls wellness’s radicalizing effect the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline,” a shadowy space where far left and far right mingle over fad diets and weird politics.
People afraid of lead in their water start following accounts that show them how to buy a water purifier. Algorithms push them deeper into a web of health influencers who distrust the government. That’s a short trip to disinformation about how the state is most definitely poisoning our water supply and, oh, haven’t you heard that vaccines implant trackers in your arm? That pipeline also builds a lot of community feedback along the way — followers, mutuals and faves. By the time a sensible person gets to the most egregious rhetoric, there are a lot of people around her or him saying that these ideas are totally normal.
There is an underlying white nationalist thread at play here — clean is synonymous with whiteness — and independence is often associated with liberation from a multiracial state. Wellness influencers merge old ideas about cleanliness with liberal ideas about independence, from the state and from puritanical shame.
Influencers can claim to be apolitical. But they promote ideas like “doing your own research” and “being a freethinker,” convenient gateways to political extremism online. Wellness becomes white nationalist when neat brands nudge people toward the idea that the state is the enemy. Extremists follow that up by telling those people the state is the enemy because it includes “others” like minorities and immigrants.
There is no better indicator of how important the wellness left-right configuration mattered to this election than Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy embodies incoherent ideas of a social-media-driven iteration of white nationalist ideas about health, such as touting raw milk and junk science about Covid-19 vaccines.
By cozying up to Kennedy, Trump was able to code himself as a standard-bearer for these ideas, even if he doesn’t necessarily embody them. Kennedy is one of Trump’s biggest cultural ambassadors for the wellness addicted.
If you don’t want to go down rabbit holes on tradwife, podcast bro and wellness influencer spaces it is enough to know two things. First, traditional political poles like “left” and “right” don’t distinguish these groups nearly as much as those political labels would imply. And second, these spaces are racially, ethnically diverse. That diversity gets lost in how we talk about these communities, but it proved very useful for Trump when he tapped into their narratives.
There is a whole cottage industry of Black men in the podcast bros space. They promote the same kind of ideas about gender essentialism that white podcast bros market, but with a twist. A podcast bro like Jordan Peterson may promote biological explanations for gender and racial differences. A Black podcast bro like Kevin Samuels, who was hugely popular until his death in 2022, took up some essentialist explanations for gendered divisions of labor, without truly taking up insidious ideas about Black inferiority.
The tradwives’ analogue is similar. Blond, thin, white women make cooking dinner an anti-feminist identity while promoting very white-identitifed notions about having as many children as God will allow. Black women’s version of the tradwife ethos is pragmatic about waged labor. They don’t necessarily stay home but they do maximize leisure and call it the “soft life.”
Racial differences like these are flattened at the level of electoral messaging. Trump’s simplicity — “I alone can fix it” — allows groups with a lot of real differences to gloss over them. The particulars don’t matter because the aesthetics are what is important. It was those aesthetics, as much as populist headwinds, that made Trump our next president.
Starting with the Obama campaign’s digital strategy in 2008, elected officials mostly engaged with online communities as sincere places, bringing a straightforward approach to political messaging. But the 2024 internet is not the 2008 internet. In 2024, online communities are mostly places where aesthetics of influencing value cheap, shiny branding and reactionary personalities. A candidate like Kamala Harris had little chance of breaking through the noisy online ecosystem.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is uniquely gifted for this media moment. By all accounts he is extremely online, as young people say. He consumes a lot of digital cultures and news. His instincts for what kind of disinformation and misinformation would resonate with overlapping edges of digital communities plugged him into a diverse audience.
His message may have sounded incoherent to a lot of liberals, but it managed to assemble a constituency of overlapping online communities that, in particular, are listening for archetypes and aesthetics, not policy. Trump gives them plenty. The sexist, racist notions about who belongs in the home, who should have a voice in public and who should be excluded from the state were ready-made to appeal to these communities.
The Trump coalition found people where they toil online. He built them a political home, one rambling speech at a time. Now, conservatives have a cultural advantage. Should liberals ever wish to regain power — or hope to keep it — they’ll have to find a way to beat disinformation while also meeting people where they are.
The post Why Trump Has Such an Unusual Hold on Our Cultural Politics appeared first on New York Times.
