Notes from a classroom
Eight years ago, almost to the day, I wrote this about my hometown and how Trumpism can have so much purchase for beaten down people who won’t get the help he promises. Today, I’m writing again in similar circumstances, this time in the face of a far more emboldened, meaner Trumpism.
My personal circumstances are far different now. I no longer work in media. There is no mid-tier media. It all collapsed just in time for me to enroll in UNC’s doctoral program in communication. I teach now, as part of my job. I’ll be done this May. Whether I get a job in the academy after or move on is basically out my hands. It’s a wasteland out there and the public university is, I’m fairly certain, about to get Rufo’d into oblivion. I bet I can parlay my qualitative research chops into UX work, but I have to get some sort of certification and hope the impending trade wars and ghastly deportation regime don’t take the economy along with the immense human suffering which is coming with them. I’m not hopeful.
I’m 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’m often cynical about what I do but this class has melted my heart quite a bit. Implicit in cultural studies is the question of what’s going on and, in the wake of the election, I tossed my lesson plan to the side (we were supposed to discuss media and information ecosystems, which are, as it turns out, germane anyway) to talk about the election. It is, after all, what’s going on.
I set some ground rules. First, this wasn’t a debate. Debating is stupid as a formal activity and as an informal activity it’s a poor classroom exercise. Second, it wasn’t precisely about setting up a new political program or resistance. That was for other spaces, at least on the day. Third, no recriminations, but also nobody could be enough of an asshole to deserve such recriminations in the first place. Instead, the discussion was about why what happened happened, the cultural mechanisms of the campaigns, media, and what appealed (or didn’t) about the candidates.
I got a show of hands on three options. If students didn’t vote, voted third party, or didn’t want to share their vote. If students voted for Harris. If students voted for Trump. Most were Harris, a few were no answer, and two were Trump voters (then a couple latecomers arrived and I didn’t ask again).
Then, we talked. Below are my thoughts:
Positionality and practice: I am a 47 year old straight white man. I have a deep voice which projects quite well; a man in a Nottingham bar came up to me and told me I have a beautiful voice. I have a beard and a good hairline for my age, both graying. I’m not the most eloquent, but I’m eloquent enough. I’m 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’m pretty middle class right now but experience the dull threat of precarity if things go poorly in a given month. I deal with chronic illness which is in remission but, without proper medication, will return and either decimate my heath or kill me. Without the ACA, which is wildly imperfect, it will bankrupt me or I will do without. I suspect one of those things will happen soon.
I lead with this because I am afforded two things by virtue of who I am and how I present. I am afforded a certain respect and deference which is not afforded to many of my colleagues and young white men respond to me with a more open mind than they do to some of those same colleagues.
I don’t consider it my job to bring them onto a political project in any sort of direct way. That’s not to say I don’t have deep political commitments. Rather, I think that neither coddling nor haranguing students does much good. I crib from my friend Daniel Joseph: my job is to get them to understand the material. What they do with it is up to them. Because I’m not Marx or Stuart Hall or Raymond Williams or Julia Kristeva. They were or are better at this than I am. And because I’m not, I trust that the material, once it does make sense to them, will do the work. It’s done the work on many, but it has to be something they get to, not because I dictate to them. I trust that this or that text, or all of them, will click. I have to. They meant so much to me when I read them. And for that reason I have a deep respect and reverance for those people and their work.
Because of my positionality and capacity to explain these things (I eschew most academic jargon, which gets me good responses in the classroom and sometimes less good responses from reviewers, to which I say that I am Popeye and I yam what I yam) I’ve found that the presentation of “here goes a thing I find important, I’ll tell you why, but you figure out if you agree” works pretty well. Especially with young men. I don’t claim to “save” them or turn them into ardent leftists. Most of them, as in every public university, will work in real estate or shuffling numbers around on spreadsheets. But they’re at the least consistently more thoughtful and considerate than they might be otherwise, and I hope that some of that is down to me.
I hope.
The Trumpists in the room: The two Trump voters surprised me. One was a white man, the other the son of African immigrants (I’m being deliberately vague here rather than trying to render Africa to a country, because it’s clearly not). One claims to lean to the right, the other hasn’t said. It’s not their demographics which surprised me, but their writing. I read their responses to their weekly readings. These are not what I’d peg as right leaning, much less nascent fascists. They comprehend the readings well. They write about how the theories, philosophies, observations apply to their lives and communities. They’re worried about back home. They’re worried about their friends, who are diverse. They were, I want to stress again, understanding, internalizing, incorporating the readings into a richer understanding of culture and their lives. Nothing, not a single response to a reading, not a single comment in class, indicated to me that they were the prototypical (and very, very real) chuds at the core of the Trump phenomenon. And yet. And yet, the votes.
So what gives?
It’s inflation: On this point, the liberal excusemaking and the most vulgar of Marxist readings of the election converge. Every incumbent party in the world lost vote share in 2024. This widely shared graph from the Financial Times shows it:
There may have been, simply, nothing to be done. This isn’t inflation based on traditional push-pull, Keynesian-neoliberal policy but inflation based on as close to an act of god as we’ll see (we hope): COVID and the attendant supply shocks which are still reverberating globally. I’m not here to debate whether Harris could’ve distanced herself from Biden more or whether there was a policy prescription which would’ve worked. There’s no existing socialist state to point to as a counterfactual. At a stretch, China, but they’re in economic contraction and what looks like the start of a deflationary spiral, which is the opposite problem (noting here that I am not a China scholar).
With this in mind, I asked who voted mostly on the economy. Almost every hand went up across all my mini voting demographics. So then I asked what does the economy mean to you in this instance?
Everyone, every single person, said inflation. I followed up by asking if they or their families (they’re 20 or 21 mostly, recall) suffered from inflation. All but one said yes.
I’ve been confused by why inflation feels so much worse than unemployment. After speaking with a colleague, we settled on two things. One, unemployment has a moral valence to it. I am unemployed because of my mistakes, I can become employed again and become a good person once more. That’s all bullshit, of course, but it’s the dominant mode of thinking.
Two, unemployment is somewhat predictable. One knows whether they have a job or not, one does not know what the price of eggs or housing will be the next day. Coupled with the moral dimension, inflation is by definition the fault of some nebulous, uncontrollable force, and the government (rightly or wrongly) serves as a stand-in. And you can see again and again how destabilizing high inflation is: Weimar Germany, 70s oil shock, 2020s COVID. That inflation might be brief, might be mild, it doesn’t seem to matter. The more advanced mechanisms are above my pay grade and I don’t pretend to know the nuances here, but I know how people react. They hate it.
Nobody trusts mass media, they’re wary of all text, but they love podcasts: I asked them whether it was Trump’s willingness to engage with podcasts which swung the election. All said yes. I asked what it was about podcasts and I got some interesting answers.
The first is that none of them trusts the news media, regardless of who they voted for. This is set now. Pack it in New York Times, Washington Post, and the rest. Flirting with Trump for sure won’t save you and I’m not sure if you can claw back the trust of liberals, because if my students are representative in any way, you’ve contrived to lose them all.
The second is that they really, really like podcasts. All of them listen to podcasts because they’re endlessly busy. Reading takes time and attention they don’t have. Or they don’t think they do. And when we discussed the appeal of podcasts, the performance of authenticity and truth-telling seemed to matter a lot more than the actuality. Joe Rogan may be a gigantic dumbass, but he performs that he’s curious, interested, and engaged. And, here’s the thing, he probably actually is those things.
In a past life, I wrote about pro wrestling for a meager living. I’m weary of Trump as pro wrestler articles, even as I wrote at least one, myself. But it is also true: the feeling of reality is better than the reality of reality. Or at least that’s some version of the truth. It feels true to me, and that’s really what matters. I like that truth.
The point here is that Rogan is some version of curious, but he performs as even more curious than he actually is. And that’s what matters to people. Kayfabe is blowing up a part of yourself until (and this is the part people miss) it becomes an entire professional discourse. You are subjectified as what you perform and you are rewarded for it. The real you dissolves under the exaggerated you, but also that doesn’t matter because the only real you that ever existed was the performative you. Ric Flair has said this explicitly: there is no Richard Fliehr and there hasn’t been for decades.
I’m a Jamesonian at heart and I’ve been revisiting “Postmodernism”. Really, I don’t know what I could say about this that he didn’t. My rough thought is that part of what makes half the population recoil from Trump is exactly what makes the other half believe anything he says: he is media. He gets it at an animal level. Fine, I’m not the first to say that. But the discomfort, and I’m setting aside his monstrous policy platform for a moment, is that we look at him and we see ourselves. We see the swirling, schizophrenic (Jameson’s sense here) morass we’ve created. I can’t stress this enough: we made him, through affirmative and passive decisions over decades. That can and should make us uncomfortable.
Text, by contrast, is fixed and weirdly suspicious by virtue of that fixity. The text could be edited. It could change. It only looks “fixed”. But a recording of words? One shot. Set aside that it is also edited, most of us don’t ponder that. And it had me wondering. What if the demoralizing literacy statistics — 21% of adults can’t read, 54% can’t read above a 6th grade level, 44% don’t read a single book in a year — are only partly about attention span and the internet (I differ from many of my peers in that I don’t think internet community is a replacement for “real world” community and I’m pretty sure that the internet has ruined our capacity to concentrate, and yes I’ve read the studies and statistics otherwise but have a good memory and a long time on the internet observing)? What if it’s that the postmodern human just can’t handle the (potential, imagined) fixity of text? There’s no performance there, but also words are there, unmoving, not flitting. They burn your mind as assuredly as they burn an old CRT monitor if it’s left on too long.
Trump is functionally illiterate. I read that somewhere. There’s probably a symbolic connection to be made.
The politics of celebrity are, counterintuitively, dead: We talked briefly about celebrity endorsements and I read aloud Stephen A. Smith’s comments about them. Did the Taylor Swift endorsement, perhaps the crown jewel in Harris’ bevy of shiny celebrity endorsements, move them? I received two answers, one echoing Smith and one quite unexpected.
Most people, again across voting pattern, were insulted by the endless wave of celebrity endorsements. In tough times (and let’s side aside the now meaningless debate about whether the economy is “actually” good, I’m concerned with feelings here), it seemed to them that billionaire and millionaire celebrities rubbed their noses in it. This includes, I want to stress and repeat, the Harris voters.
One of the Harris voters went further: she knew that Swift and Beyonce weren’t for her, they were for Harris. The endorsement felt like part of the procession of Hollywood, more Met Gala or Academy Awards than meaningful politics. The celebrities, in short, were there to celebrate the standard power arrangement than any affirmative political act 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 articulated some version of it feeling authentic. The very fadedness of his stable of celebrities was, unexpectedly to me, part of the appeal.
The other main thread, which I also didn’t expect but made a lot of sense, is that seeing celebrities isn’t special anymore. We really have yet to grapple with this, but those of us old enough to write and research for our careers still think of celebrities as glamourous and lending a unique sheen when they appear. My students told me they don’t. They see Taylor Swift on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, in commercials, in concerts, in movies, on TV interviews, at awards shows. There’s no impact there. None.
But also, what if these celebrities aren’t even as big as that? Go back to podcasting: who do these students spend the most meaningful(mediatized) time with, Joe Rogan or Taylor Swift? Their favorite TikToker or George Clooney? The makeup influencer (and I’m revealing my complicity in willfully not understanding this dynamic because I can’t think of a single makeup influencer’s name) or Chapell Roan? I’m pretty sure I know the answer, because every day at lunch I engage in my most normie trait: I watch Good Mythical Morning. I watch Rhett and Link more consistently and more eagerly than I watch movies or television shows or my beloved Arsenal.
All of which reveals a terrible implication: what if Trump is the last celebrity who matters? What if he’s the only celebrity left? I don’t get it, most of you reading this don’t get it, but I think even the Harris voters in my class get it.
They don’t think he’ll do what he says: Nobody thinks he’s going to do what he says he’ll do. I barely have to elaborate on this, it’s well-worn. I was surprised that not even the Harris voters thought he’s serious. The anarchist activist in my class kind of thinks he’s serious, but even then it wasn’t as full-throated as I expected. I think this complicates the narrative that every Trump voter knows what they’re in for. I don’t think they do. I don’t think most Harris voters know.
This really surprised me. I don’t coddle them, so we talked about the policy implications in as much detail as ten minutes would allow, and I told them that I sure hope they’re right but I don’t think so.
Then we moved on.
People really hate Democrats: I want to return to my Trump voters here. I mean it when I say these are not right-wingers, but one of them says openly he leans right and the other is what I read as a thoughtful, liberal evangelical. I cannot stress it enough so I’m going to repeat it: these are not right-wingers.
So why do they think they are?
That’s a hell of a question. What I’m left with is affective polarization. I don’t love, and in fact hate, polarization as an ouroborous explanation for all of our political ills. But it’s also the case that affective polarization has reached the level of import usually reserved for race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identity/demographic markers. I was told of a study by a sociologist friend, though I’ve not read it (and can’t remember who did it, I have a lot coming across my deck, so this is my bad, as Trump’s base of my fellow Gen Xers say), which details how Democrat/Republican ranks at or near the top of answers to the prompt “I would not want my child dating BLANK”.
There’s no inherent meaning to the moniker Democrat or Republican, or really liberal or conservative. These terms are so yoked to party politics, which by definition turn over at least every four years and constantly shift in terms of platform, that they don’t mean anything. They’re empty signifiers, as assuredly as Stuart Hall notes race is. What it means can be anything, even as what we culturally decide that meaning might be is cthonically deep and has real world import.
All of which is to say that I’m pretty sure these two Trump voters, who are reading Said, reading Bourdieu, reading Mulvey, reading Hall, reading Marx, just really don’t like Democrats. And, for what it’s worth, a fair number of the Harris voters are clearly getting sick of them, too.
I don’t know what you do with this. I have zero love for the Democrats, even though I vote for them consistently (I vote every time I can because it’s meaningless rather than because it’s meaningful, a stance I’m happy to explain over a cup of tea but isn’t really relevant here). Here, at the threshold of the abyss, I really wanted Harris to win. But if this disdain for “Democrat” has taken root, the Democrats are, in a word, fucked. The policies won’t matter, the GOTV efforts won’t matter (and, in fact, didn’t), the sneering at non-Democrats (also affective polarization) won’t matter. They’re doomed.
Conclusion
The best I can offer on that last point is that we, as educators or activists or just concerned people, have to unwind some of this. How can I get those two Trump voters to realize they’re not conservatives, at least in the way they think they are?
To an extent, it doesn’t matter. They do the readings and engage with them with enthusiasm. They’re generous young men just trying to figure stuff out. Politics is what you do, not a matter of category. Let them call themselves what they want.
But also one of the political things they did was vote for Trump.
I’m going to offer a few thoughts, and I suspect they may not go down easily. I am endlessly worried about where young men, and especially young white men, are headed to the point of preoccupation. If we say we can educate them the right way, guess what: they’re not going to college. If we say we can steer them toward better media, guess what: it doesn’t exist or they don’t have easy access to it. And if we just need to outnumber them, we said that last decade and no, we can’t outnumber them, or not by enough. I’ve been reading about the impending demographic shift for 20+ years.
We have to meet them where they are a little more than we currently do. This is the tough pill to swallow. I don’t pretend to truly know what it means to be marginalized and to be asked to do the extra work of that grace. It has to be justifiably, deservedly, unambiguously exhausting. I’d probably want to read the Trump voters for filth. We (you) won’t reach all of them. I also know that the academy has no choice. We’re at the precipice.
But also maybe “reaching them” isn’t precisely the point. I say this a lot and said it above: for all the sturm und drang about how we have to change the world through the university, I’ve never considered that to be what I do. I teach future real estate agents. If I were an activist, I’d go be an activist. Which isn’t to say that I don’t do activist-type work at times, but I’m not like my friends working the picket lines, running bail support, or putting their asses on the line protesting against a line of cops. If the best I can do is get that real estate agent to be a bit kinder, to vote for that school bond, to shed the impulse to pass over their Black employee for a raise, I think I’ve done okay, even as I recognize it’s not really enough.
A woman told me that, after taking my class a couple years ago, she decided to work with disadvantaged children in the Outer Banks instead of going into finance. That was a win.
For the straight white guys out there, you really should, and indeed must, use your capacity to make that space. Especially if, like me, you have a deep voice and a (not very good) beard. I’d love to say those things don’t matter but they do. But also you can’t fake it. You actually have to want it. You have to say yes, I hear you and I don’t agree with that, it’s not my politics, but let me give you a reading here that might complicate that assumption. Let’s unpack that, and also I promise I’m not going to yell at you. You can call it white fragility or say that’s not your job or any number of things which may be or at least feel true, and also we tried all that and, well, precipice. Again, you won’t get all of them. Some of them will actually be the real deal staffing the Freikorps. You can’t move those people and they’ll probably call you a soy-cuck to your face. But not all of them. Maybe not even many of them.
This is Paul Gilroy 101 and we have a tough time with that in the academy. And we all fancy ourselves Gramscists, reflexively, but Gramsci sure as shit wouldn’t be foreclosing on the possibility that we can change the commonsense of the time. I’m a humanist and that’s deeply unfashionable. I can’t even thoroughly defend that stance half the time. But I’m a fan of Gilroy’s approach, that the only way forward is to start building convial, multicultural institutions and communities (I’d get rid of Gilroy’s sometimes reflexive and strange antimarxism, though; we don’t really need to answer for the ever-receding Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia anymore, Paul, we’re just middle class academics who weren’t there). And, yes, that includes the white boys, because some form of inclusion there, even as we insist it can’t mean their dominance, goes a long way.
You can’t shirk from talking about the legacies of colonialism or patriarchy. But, again, it’s about the space to get them there. When we did a week on feminism, I asked what did feminism offer men. Nobody said a word. Not the men, not the women, not the non-binary student. Not the feminists. Not the students who are skeptical of feminism as traditionally presented. No one. This outright shocked me, because I remember in the 1990s it was an article of sooth, in my circles at least, that feminism offers a myriad of new possibilities to men. That they no longer had any inkling of that fact isn’t their fault, it’s ours. The answer is obvious: you can be a different sort of man, a kinder, more generous one, than what you think you must be. Make it obvious. Most people want to be kind.
We also have to create a different media ecosystem for young men and boys to engage with, one which presents a different model of masculinity than Andrew Tate’s. This derives from discussions and observations on Bluesky, but it’s unreal the way that you cannot enter a masculine-coded space like a gym or watch stuff like Twitch without being inundated with right-wing stuff. Crypto ads, gambling connections, tox-masc grifters, testosterone supplements. We have to do something.
I don’t precisely know how you do that. There are so many material barriers to this. There’s no real money or infrastructure for it. But we better start thinking of something.
One of the Trump voters sent me a touching email saying that it’s the best lecture he’s had at UNC. He thanked me for being open to him saying some right wing things. I haven’t emailed him back, but I’ll say, “But REDACTED, you didn’t say anything right wing at all.” And I’ll mean it: he didn’t! I legitimately had no idea what he meant, because he mostly listened and talked about inflation and podcasts. But he thinks he did (and god help us if inflation is now right-coded, but also maybe we shouldn’t sneer about “treats”). And that’s something we have to figure out.
I closed the class by reading Brecht’s “The Solution”:
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
I grant the possible, maybe probable, naivety of some of this. Perhaps all of it. And the academy isn’t the government, though for a 20 year old college student it may as well be. But these are the people we’ve got and they’re not dissolving.
