Eight years ago, almost to the day, I wrote about how Trump could make so many purchases for people who don’t promise Trump and hit them. Today, I am writing again in a similar situation.
My personal situation is vastly different now. I no longer work in media. There is no mid-tier media. I collapsed in time to enroll in a PhD program in Communication at UNC. I now teach as part of my job. I will finish this May. Whether I get a job in academia or move is basically in my hands. It’s a wasteland out there, and I am sure public universities will forget Rufo. I hope qualitative research can transition into UX work, but I hope the impending trade war and the enormous deportation system do not take the economy with the tremendous human suffering that comes with it. I am not hopeful.
I am teaching cultural studies this semester. It’s the best class I’ve taught in my 5.5 years at UNC. My students are bright, engaging, diverse, and endlessly curious. I am often cynical about what I do, but this class has really melted my heart. The content inherent in cultural studies is a matter of what is happening, and by the end of the election, I threw the lesson plan to the side (we had to discuss the media and the information ecosystem. We talked about the election. Ultimately, it’s about what is happening).
I set some basic rules. First, this was not a debate. Discussions are formal activities that are foolish, and informal activities are not good for classroom dynamics. Second, it was not accurate to set up new political programs or resistance. It was at least for another space that day. Third, I don’t remember, but no one could be the foolish person who deserves such memories at first. Instead, the discussion was about why things happened, the campaigns, the cultural mechanisms of the media, and what the candidates did not appeal to (or did not).
I got a show of three options. If students did not vote, voted for a third party, or did not want to split their vote. If students voted for Harris. If students voted for Trump. Most were for Harris, a few said no answer, and two were Trump voters (then a few latecomers arrived, and I never asked again).
Then we said. Here’s what I think.
Position and Practice: I am a 47-year-old straight white man. I have a deep voice that projects very well. A man at a bar in Nottingham came up to me and said I had a beautiful voice. I have a beard and a good hairline for my age. I am not the most persuasive, but I am eloquent enough. I am smart, but not as smart as I am eloquent. Most of my colleagues are smarter. I have a family, a dog, and a mortgage. I am currently quite middle class, but if the situation is not good in a given month, I experience a dull threat. I deal with a chronic illness that is being managed, but without proper medication, my health will either return or kill me. Without the incredibly flawed ACA, it will bankrupt me or leave me without it. I think one of those things will happen soon.
I lead with this because I was given two things by who I am and how I present myself. I received a certain respect and performance that many of my colleagues and young white men do not respond to with the same open-mindedness.
I do not consider it my job to bring them into political projects in any direct way. That is not to say I have no deep political commitments. Rather, I think coding or weak students are not that good. My job is to help them understand the material. What they do with it is up to them. I am not Marx or Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, or Julia Kristeva. They were better at this than I am. And because I am not, I believe that once the material is understood by them, it will do the work. It has done the work for many people, but it should be their work, not because I directed them. I believe this or that text, or all of them, will click for them. I have to. They meant a lot to me when I read them. And for that reason, I have deep respect and admiration for those people and their work.
Because of my position and ability to explain such things (I avoided most academic jargon. This gets good responses in the classroom and sometimes good responses from reviewers. I found that “Here’s something important. I will tell you why. But I will find out if you agree” works well, especially with young people. I do not claim to “save” them or turn them into fervent leftists. Most of them will work with spreadsheets or shuffling numbers, as is the case in all public universities. But they are at least consistently more thoughtful and considerate than other work, and I hope some of that is up to me.
I hope so.
Trump supporters in the room: Two Trump voters surprised me. One was white, and the other was the son of African immigrants (I am intentionally vague rather than trying to make Africa one country. One claimed to lean right, and the other did not say). What surprised me was not the demographics but the writing. I read their responses to their weekly readings. These are not my correct expectations, much less deviating from early fascism. They understand the readings well. They write about how theory, philosophy, and observation apply to their lives and communities. They are worried about going home. They are concerned about their diverse friends. They wanted to emphasize, understand, internalize, and incorporate the readings into a rich understanding of culture and their lives. It was not a single response to the reading, nor was it a single opinion in class that indicated to me that they were prototypes (and very, very real) chuds at the core of the Trump phenomenon. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, they voted.
So what do I offer?
Inflation: At this point, the most vulgar liberal excuses and Marxist readings of the election converge. All incumbents in the world lost their voting share in 2024. The widely shared graph from the Financial Times is as follows.
In short, it might not have had anything to do. This is not inflation based on traditional push-pull, Keynesian-neoliberal policies, but rather an inflation that is closer to the acts of God as we see it: the Covid and the crew supply shock reverberating globally. I am not here to discuss whether Harris could be further from Biden or whether there were policy prescriptions. Existing socialist states point to a significant contraction. At one time, China, but they are in economic contraction and seem to be at the beginning of a deflationary spiral, which is the opposite problem (I note here that I am not a scholar of China).
With this in mind, I asked most people who voted for the economy. Almost every hand went up across all mini voting demographics. So I asked what the economy meant to them in that case.
Everyone, everyone said inflation. I asked if they and their families (20 or 21, mostly recall) were suffering from inflation. Everyone but one said yes.
I was confused about why inflation was much worse than unemployment. After talking with colleagues, we settled on two things. One, unemployment has a moral price tag attached to it. I am unemployed due to a mistake, and I can be re-employed and be a good person again. Of course, that is all nonsense, but it is the dominant mindset.
Second, unemployment is somewhat predictable. You know whether there are jobs. You do not know how much the price of eggs or housing will be the next day. With a moral dimension, inflation is by definition a misfortune of some bothersome and uncontrollable force, and the government plays the role of stand-in (right or wrong). And you can see how unstable high inflation can be: Weimar Germany, the oil shocks of the 70s, Covid in the 2020s. Inflation can be short and light and seem unimportant. The advanced mechanisms raise wage tiers, and I do not know the nuances here, but I know how people react. They hate it.
No one trusts the mainstream media, is cautious about all texts, but they love podcasts. I asked them if they would be willing to participate in a podcast that shakes up the election. Everyone said yes. I asked what it was about podcasts, and I got interesting answers.
The first is that none of them trust news media regardless of who they voted for. This is now set. Wrap it up with the New York Times, Washington Post, and the rest. It is certainly tempting with Trump, but it will not save you, and I am not sure if you can lean back on the trust of libertarians. Because if my students represent anything, it’s that you have worked hard to lose them all.
The second is that they really like podcasts. They all listen to podcasts because they are endlessly busy. Reading requires time and attention. Or at least they think so. And when we discussed the appeal of podcasts, the performance of authenticity and truthfulness seemed far more important than the actual. Joe Rogan may be a huge fool, but he is curious, interested, and engaged. And here’s the problem. He may actually be that way.
In a past life, I wrote about pro wrestling for a meager living. I defended Trump as a pro wrestling character. But that is also true. The feeling of reality is better than the reality of reality. Or at least that is a version of the truth. It feels true to me, and that matters. I like that truth.
The point here is that Rogan is a version of curiosity, but he is actually more curious than himself. And that matters to people. Kayfabe is blowing off some of itself. You are the main subject of what you perform, and you are compensated for it. The real that melts under exaggerated people has exaggerated you, but it does not matter because the only real that existed was you performing. Ric Flair said this explicitly. Richard Fliehr has not been around for decades.
I am revisiting Jamesonian and “postmodernism.” In fact, I do not know what to say about this that he did not. My rough thought is that part of what makes half the population recoil from Trump is that the other half believes what he says. He is the media. He gets it at an animal level. Okay, I am not saying that. But the discomfort and I am setting aside his monstrous policy platform for a moment. We see him and see ourselves. We see the swirling and schizophrenic fool of Jameson’s Sense. I cannot emphasize this enough: we made him through positive and passive decisions over decades. It can and should make us uncomfortable.
In contrast, texts are fixed and strangely suspect because of their fixity. Texts can be edited. They can change. They appear “fixed.” But the recording of words? One shot. Setting aside that it has been edited, most of us do not reflect on it. And that is what I wondered. What if 21% of adults cannot read, 54% cannot read above a sixth-grade level, and 44% do not read a single book a year? (I differ from many colleagues in that I do not think internet communities replace “real” communities. I am sure the internet can ruin focus. And otherwise, the statistics have good memories and long times in internet observation)? What do we do if postmodern humans cannot handle the (potential, imaginative) fixity of texts? There is no performance, but there is no nonsense, and it does not pop out. They burn your mind when an old CRT monitor stays too long, just like burning an old CRT monitor.
Trump is functionally illiterate. I read that somewhere. There may be a symbolic connection.
The politics of celebrity are counterintuitive, dead . Did Taylor Swift’s endorsement, perhaps the crown jewel of Harris’s shiny celebrity endorsements, move them? I received two answers. One was echoing Smith, and one was unexpected.
Across voting patterns, most people were insulted by the endless wave of celebrity endorsements. In tough times (and excluding the meaningless debate about whether the economy is “really” good, I am interested in emotion here), billionaires and millionaire celebrities seemed to be rubbing their noses. There is a desire for stress and repetition among Harris voters.
One of the Harris voters went further. She realized that Swift and Beyoncé were not for her but for Harris. The endorsements felt more like part of the Hollywood parade, more like the Met Gala or Academy Awards than meaningful politics. In short, celebrities were there to celebrate the standard power arrangements rather than positive political acts, and they found it annoying.
When I asked about people like Lee Greenwood and the rest of Trump’s D-listers and has-beens, everyone expressed some version of genuinely feeling it. The very faintness of his stable of celebrities was unexpectedly part of the appeal to me.
What I did not expect but made a lot of sense was that seeing celebrities is no longer special. We have not fully grappled with this issue yet, but those of us old enough to write and research for our careers think of celebrities as lending a glamorous and unique sheen. My students told me it is not so. They see Taylor Swift on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, ads, concerts, movies, TV interviews, and award shows. There is no impact. None.
But what if these celebrities are not that big? Returning to podcasts: who spends the most meaningful (mediated) time with Joe Rogan or Taylor Swift? Their favorite TikToker or George Clooney? Makeup influencers (and I reveal my complicity in not being able to think of a single makeup influencer’s name) or Chapell Roan? I am confident I know the answer because I engage in the most Normie characteristics at lunch every day. I see Rhett more consistently than I see movies or TV shows or my beloved Arsenal.
All of this shows a terrible meaning. What if Trump is the last celebrity? What if he is the only remaining celebrity? I do not get it. Most people reading this do not get it, but I think even the Harris voters in my class get it.
They do not think he will do what he says. No one thinks he will do what he says. I hardly need to elaborate on this. Even the Harris voters were surprised that they did not think he was serious. My anarchist in the class thinks he is serious, but he was not as reckless as I expected. I complicate the story that all Trump voters know what they are doing. I do not think they do. I do not think most Harris voters think so.
This was genuinely surprising. I did not put them in a box, so we talked for about ten minutes about the detailed policy implications, and they said they hoped they were right but did not think so.
Then we moved on.
People really hate the Democrats. I want to return to the Trump voters here. I mean it when I say these are not right-wingers, but one openly said he leans right, and the other is someone I read as a thoughtful, liberal evangelical. I cannot emphasize it enough, so I will repeat it: these are not right-wingers.
So why do they think that?
That is the hell of a question. What I left is emotional polarization. I do not love polarization as our explanation for all our political ills, and I actually hate it. But emotional polarization has also reached income levels that are generally reserved for race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identity/demographic markers. I have heard about a friend’s research as a sociologist, but I have not read it, and I cannot remember who did it. I have a lot across my deck. Xers are saying), detailing how Democrats/Republicans rank at the top or near the top of the answers to “I do not want my child to date a blank.”
There is no unique meaning for a Democratic or Republican moniker, nor is it actually libertarian or conservative. These terms lose meaning at least every four years by definition and constantly change in platform terms. Like Stuart Hall’s note on race, they have empty meanings. Even if we culturally decide they mean something, that meaning can mean anything.
All of this makes me sure that these two Trump voters I read are reading Bourdieu, reading Mulvey, reading Hall, reading Marx. And for what it’s worth, the Harris voters are clearly hurting them.
I do not know what you do with this. I have no love for the Democrats. Although I consistently vote for them (I can vote every time I can because it means something. Here). Even at the threshold of the abyss, I really wanted Harris to win. But if this contempt for “the Democrats” is rooted, the Democrats are fucked in a word. Policy does not matter, GOTV efforts do not matter (they really do not), and anti-democratic anti-democratic (emotional polarization) does not matter. They are doomed.
Conclusion
At the last point, the best I can offer is that we need to unpack some of this as educators or activists or concerned people. How can two Trump voters realize they are not conservatives in the way they think?
To some extent, it does not matter. They are reading and engaging with passion. They are just generous young people trying to figure things out. Politics is not a matter of categories; it is what you do. Let them call it what they want.
But one of the political acts they did was vote for Trump.
I will offer some thoughts, and I think they will not go down easily. I am endlessly worried about where young people, especially young white men, are heading toward the point of prejudice. What do you guess if we say we can educate them the right way? They will not go to college. What do you guess if we say we can steer toward better media: it does not exist or is not easily accessible. And if we just have to surpass them, we have said we cannot or are not enough to surpass them for the last ten years. I have read about impending demographic changes for over 20 years.
We need to meet them a little more where they are now. This is a bitter pill to swallow. I do not pretend to know what it means to be alienated and asked to do the extra work of grace. It should justifiably, obviously, and ambiguously be exhausting. I would probably want to read the shit of Trump voters. We will not reach all of them. I also know that the academy has no choice. We are at the cliff.
But perhaps “reaching them” is not exactly the point. I say this a lot and said above. I teach future real estate agents. If I were an activist, I would be an activist. I cannot say that it sometimes does not look like activist form, but I am not like friends who work the picket line or run bail funds or put their butts on the line protesting the police. The best I can do is to get real estate agents to be a little kinder and vote for school bonds and let impulses spill to raise Black staff. Recognize that it is not enough.
One woman told me after finishing my class a few years ago that instead of going into finance, she decided to work with underprivileged kids at an outside bank. That was a win.
For straight white men, you actually have to use your ability to create that space. Especially if, like me, you have a deep voice and (not very good) beard. I want to say those things do not matter, but they do. But you cannot fake it. You have to really want it. You have to say yes. I do not hear you and agree. That is not my politics, but I will give you readings that can complicate that assumption. Unpack it, and I also promise not to yell at you. You can call it white vulnerability or say it is not your job or at least something that feels true, and we have also tried all of that and the cliff. Again, you will not get all of them. Some of them will actually be the real deal that employs Freikorps. You cannot move those people, and they will probably call you a bean in your face. But not all of them. Perhaps many of them may not even be.
This is Paul Gilroy 101, and we are having a hard time in the academy. And we all reflexively like Gramsci, but Gramsci is not sure that he will not seize the possibility of changing the common sense of time. I am a humanist, and that does not trend deeply. I cannot thoroughly defend that stance half the time. But I am a fan of Gilroy’s approach. The only way is to start building guilty verdicts, multicultural institutions, and communities. No more Czech-Slovakian Soviet invasions; we are middle-class scholars who were not there). Yes. This includes white boys. Because we cannot argue that we mean their domination, some form of inclusion is involved.
You cannot stop talking about the legacy of colonialism or patriarchy. But again, it is about creating space to get them there. When we did a week on feminism, I asked what feminism offered. No one said a word. Not a man, not a woman, not a non-binary student. Not a feminist. Not students who are traditionally skeptical of the feminism presented. No one. This shocked me because I remember in the 1990s that feminism offered countless new possibilities for men. The fact that they no longer have ink on that fact is not their fault; it is ours. The answer is clear. You can be a different kind of person, kind and more generous than you think. Make it clear. Most people want to be kind.
We also need to create other media ecologies that young people and boys can engage with. This comes from discussions and observations about Bluesky, but it is unrealistic to enter spaces like gyms that are male-coded or flooded with right-wing stuff without watching things like Twitch. Crypto ads, gambling connections, tox-masc greeters, testosterone supplements. We have to do something.
I do not know exactly how you do that. There are too many material barriers to it. There is no real money or infrastructure. But we need to start thinking of something.
One of the Trump voters sent me an impressive email saying it was the best lecture at UNC. He thanked me for talking about the right wing. I would not have emailed him, but I would say, “But edited, you did not talk about the right wing at all.” And I mean it: he did not! I legitimately had no idea what he meant because he primarily heard me talk about inflation and podcasts. But he thinks he did (and if inflation has the right buzzwords now, God help us, but perhaps we should not be happy about “treating”). And that is what we will have to figure out.
I closed the class by reading Brecht’s “Solution.”
After the uprising of June 17
The secretary of the writers' union
Leaflets were distributed on Stalinallee
People state
They have lost trust in the government
And can it be regained
With a red effort. Isn’t it easier?
In the case of the government
Dissolve the people
And elect another?
I grant some naive possibilities of this. Perhaps all of it. And the academy is not the government, but it may be so for a 20-year-old college student. But these are the people we have, and they do not melt away.