Manliness, Cat Ladies, Fertility Panic and the 2024 Election

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2024

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A strange new gender politics is roiling the 2024 election. At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump made his nomination a show of campy masculinity, with Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, warming up the crowd. JD Vance’s first viral moments have been comments he made in 2021 about “childless cat ladies” running the Democratic Party and a “thought experiment” assigning extra votes to parents because they have more of an “investment in the future of this country.” Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is centering her campaign on abortion rights, and Tim Walz has been playing up his own classically masculine profile — as a former football coach, hunter and Midwestern dad. What are the two sides here really saying about gender and family? And what are the new fault lines of our modern-day gender wars? Christine Emba is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.” Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox and the author of the new book “The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.” In this conversation, we discuss some influences on JD Vance’s ideas about gender and family, the tensions between those ideas and the beliefs about gender represented by Donald Trump, the competing visions of masculinity presented by the two parties in this election, how Dobbs changed Democrats’ message on gender and family, and more. Mentioned: “What Does the 'Post-Liberal Right' Actually Want?” with Patrick Deneen on The Ezra Klein Show “A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe” with Pippa Norris on The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: Black Pill by Elle Reeve What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien Justice, Gender, and the Family by Susan Moller Okin Cultural Backlash by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy by Daniel Ziblatt Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. presidential elections are too vast and complicated to be about any one thing.
0:28.7	But they're sometimes more about one thing than they are about other things. The 2016 election was more
0:35.9	about immigration, about who counted as an American. The 2020 election was more
0:41.6	about Donald Trump,
0:42.9	about what kind of country America was and would become.
0:47.1	And the 2024 election is more about gender and family.
0:55.2	Now normally when people say an election is about gender and family they're saying it's about women. Men in politics, men in
1:00.3	power. That's the background. That's considered normal. It is when something
1:05.0	challenges at or begins to change or a new set of issues and questions come to the
1:09.4	fore that they're noticed and they become something we fight over.
1:13.2	But that is not what I'm saying is happening in the 2024 election.
1:17.2	It's visions of masculinity that are unstable and contested in this race.
1:22.0	In Donald Trump and in Tim Walls, you have two very different but very explicit archetypes,
1:29.6	visions of what it means to be a man.
1:33.0	Trump's pitch is built on,
1:35.0	I would call it an almost cartoonish overperformance
1:38.0	of masculinity, which is aimed at alienated young men.
1:41.0	I mean, having Hulk Hogan and the head of the U of C on
1:45.1	your night at the convention really puts a sharp point on that. But in Tim
1:49.9	Wall's Democrats have found their own version of a male archetype, a
1:54.4	football coach, a soldier, a guy who will fix your car, but also an ally, a man
2:01.6	comfortable being in the role of supporting women, a man
	...

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