Embracing Uncertainty in the Election
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Hey, this is Ronny Chieng. The Daily Show is on break this week, but don't worry, we put together some special highlights for you to catch up on in case you missed them. We'll be back on September 10th. Until then, enjoy this episode. Tonight, Rebecca Traister is a writer for New York Magazine and author of Good and Mad, and Brittany Cooper is a professor at Rutgers University and author of Eloquent Rage. Please welcome Rebecca Traister and Brittany Cooper.

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited to have you both on in this moment in particular. There's been a real vibe shift here with Kamala Harris entering the race.

And Rebecca, you wrote this incredible article that I felt so beautifully articulated this collective feeling that many of us have about uncertainty and the beauty of uncertainty and what a thrill it is in this moment in time.

Yeah, I mean, I'm grateful for the uncertainty. And that's a hard thing to say because we live in a scary time. There's a lot to be terrified about. There are a lot of horrible things happening around us. And in the context of that fear, we often reach for sure things, but sure things often look like the past. And when we want to make history, this campaign, we've never done this before.

We've never had a campaign like this in this amount of time, in these circumstances. We have a black woman running for the presidency. We don't have a model for how we do this on this schedule, at this scale, with so much on the line. And that is terrifying. And many of us, in political terms, reach for things that make us feel safe, polls that tell us

that we're gonna win or even polls that tell us we're gonna lose 'cause then at least we can be prepared and we're not gonna be surprised and shaken. But I actually think that right now,

the anxiety, the fear around this risk and this exciting moment is the exhilarating motivation we need because it is appropriate to this moment and the stakes and what we're looking at and what it's going to do is draw us into action, which is the only way to move forward through the next 83 days and beyond, is to let that uncertainty remind us that we have to act and engage.

You brought up the polls, and I think so many of us go to the polls and are, you know, watching them obsessively. Maybe I'm just referring to myself, but why are the polls so dangerous to be watching? Why should we not be hanging it all on that? I mean, have any of you ever been called for a poll? None of us picked it up.

None of us picks up the phone for 10 walls missed the VP's phone call because he didn't recognize her phone number. So that tells you all you need to know about who's being polled. It's our grannies and our aunties. And while they matter, they are reliable voters. But this election is about who is going to be newly engaged and newly excited. And those of us, you know, and those folks are folks who are glued to their phones and who are just not going to pick up for anybody that they don't know.

Brittany, you talk so much about the importance of faith in moments like these, the importance that faith has had in historical events and organization and social movements. How does faith play into this moment right now? Yeah, you know, faith is a tricky term because most times people think that we're trying to, you know, draw them into the cult of organized religion. Which is why I brought you all here today. We're going to pass around the hat.

We'll be on our way. Correct. You know, and look, we're going to leave the culting to the to the Trump camp. Ultimately, faith is not just a religious project. It's a secular project. And it simply means that we have to believe in things that we have not seen before in order to bring them about.

Faith is the distance between what we can prove and what we think is possible. And sometimes we struggle to have faith because we don't want to be wrong and we don't want to be made a fool of. We don't want to have to risk something because our politics is made a fool of us a lot. But I tend to think that, you know, it's just like falling in love. Everybody, somebody's fool, as Aretha Franklin famously said.

And so I want to be a fool for the side of saving democracy, for the side of justice and righteousness, for the side of the people getting to participate in their politics, for women having a say about what happens to their bodies. For trans folks getting the care that they need and for all the elders in my life actually having health care and the things that they need to live well and thrive even into old age.

We know what happened in 2016. If Kamala Harris becomes president, she would be the first female president. She'd be the first black female president. She'd be the first South Asian person to be president. This is obviously something to be celebrated and incredibly meaningful for so many reasons.

But at the same time, how should we be talking about this? How much should the campaign be leaning into this? And how much might it undermine how qualified she is as just being the right person for the job right now?

I think it's a really tricky balance because on the one hand, you don't want to fixate on these firsts and the pure identity changes and representative changes because there has to be substance along with that too, right? We could be talking about Nikki Haley and have some of the same firsts and we'd be feeling very differently about that situation. So I want to say that just talking about the representative firsts

isn't enough. And yet we cannot behave in this country as though we are a nation that has ever previously managed to elect a woman in 250 years, right? So we can't trick ourselves either into thinking that there is not

a lot happening in this campaign and on these stages that we do not have models for, that we need to turn to different degrees of faith, that we need to sit in our anxiety about whether we as a country can become better, right? And become different and do things differently and imagine leadership

That doesn't look like the leadership we've had in the past. So it would be silly to pretend that those things don't come into it. And I think deeply dishonest about who we are as a country and about the possibility of who we could become as a country. But at the same time, the thing you've got to acknowledge when you acknowledge that she's first is also all of the unreasonable expectations that come with being first. It is the moment that a corporation decides they're going to let a woman actually run it after they've almost sunk it.

You know, we call those glass clip assignments or it's that moment that so many black women have experienced. Many times I've experienced where you look up and you're the only black person in the room, the only black woman in the room. And so the stakes are incredibly high and there is no margin for error.

And we've got to remember, how do we balance the fact that she is first, but she doesn't get to be the exception, right? She is first, but she is going to have to respond to protesters. She is first, but she is going to have to be accountable for policy and how it actually shapes people's lives. She is first. And at the same time, people are going to expect her to be Jesus because they always expect black women to be Jesus. Right.

You have both written extensively about using the power of anger and using the power of rage. Female politicians are not given any grace to have anger or rage. Is there any reason why they should give a flying about that? I mean, you know, look, my camp is, you know, lean into that shit. Like, it'll... You know? Yeah. Um...

I have famously said that rage is a superpower because we live in a country that always does things to induce women's anger, to induce black women's anger, and then it gaslights us and tells us that we're actually irrational because we're angry at a country that says we don't have control over our bodies, at a country that is disrespecting cat ladies, you know, in a country where women say brilliant things in meetings all the time and no one hears it until the dude in the room says the same thing.

And so, of course we're mad, but we're also geniuses, we're also dope, we're also joyful. These things are not mutually exclusive. And I want to pick up on that joyful thing, which is that one of the things that Brittany and I both talked about is that anger and rage can have a lot of different qualities. It can be destructive, it can be divisive.

But expressed anger, especially at injustice and power imbalance and anger on behalf of making the world better, can also bring people together in communion. And what we see right now, the vibe shift that you talked about, there is this crucial thing happening, which is that there is no question that there is a kind of...

fury at what's at stake, motivating so many people, not only on the campaign trail, but the people who are organizing these calls. And yet, that shared anger is bringing people together. What is being projected by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on that-- on those stages is unfettered joy. -That's right. -The beauty of being able-- the happiness of being able to envision some-- a future that looks different from our past. That's right. That's right.

Rebecca, you had a really interesting piece on masculinity and the way that it's framed on both sides, on the Democratic side and on the Republican side. Where are the contrasts that you see? Oh. Can you think of any? They're subtle. Yeah.

So it's interesting because coming out of two years of Republicans really having their clock cleaned on every reproductive rights referenda in this country, there was this thought that Donald Trump and his campaign and the Republicans more broadly are going to stay away from abortion. Right. They're not in a popular place on abortion.

they're losing on abortion. So they weren't going to talk about that. And they didn't really at the convention. What is fascinating to me is their inability to hide their loathing for women, right? Their scorn for women. So that if you look at that production, a planned show they put on last month,

You had Hulk Hogan, who's been accused of domestic assault. You had Dana White, the head of Ultimate Fighting, also been caught domestic.

doing assault. You had Donald Trump walking out to It's a Man's World, right? You have J.D. He picked J.D. Vance, right? And these guys are trafficking not only in the historic sort of patriarchal we'd like to control reproductive bodies and, you know, exert our power over women. You have the newer manosphere sort of ickier real dislike of

like resentment of women who won't have sex with them on demand and who won't bear their babies on demand. And that's really seeping into this in a kind of new gross way that you see Donald Trump is doing interviews with Elon Musk, who is a person who said that abortion and birth control have led to the crumbling of society and thinks that people who don't have children shouldn't vote. And that's who Trump is doing his podcast with. And you can hear all those resentments of the manosphere in everything J.D. Vance says about cat ladies and

that he agrees with about the role of postmenopausal women as being child... Their purpose is to be a grandma. So that's what's happening for the Republicans. And then on the left, in part because you have Kamala Harris leading the ticket, what you've seen is...

A lot of guys coming out in really robust ways in support of her, talking fulsomely about reproductive health care and access, talking about-- I have been out there listening to Doug Emhoff talk about pap smears. Tim Walz passed-- you know, made period products available in school bathrooms. He signed abortion protections into law in Minnesota. He talks about his IVF journey. These are very traditionally masculine guys

right like football coach veterans and yet they seem to be comfortable in a way that I have rarely seen Democratic men be comfortable before making reproductive health care and access and women's full civic participation a clarion moral call of the Democratic Party and that is a remarkable thing that we're watching on the left

You know, the only thing I would add about this masculinity thing is that I think that J.D. Vance is having the terrible realization that he picked the wrong daddy. He picked Trump, and really what he wanted was Tim Walz. You know?

Look, we have a politics that actually rewards men who have these embattled relationships with their fathers. It was true for Barack Obama. It's true for Donald Trump. We're seeing it with J.D. Vance. And then you have Tim Walz, who's this lovely father figure. And so it is time for America to have this reckoning around its own consistent daddy issues. And, you know, this is the way we can solve the incel problem. Who knew we just needed a high school football coach? Who knew?

I also want to say it is so important when we talked about the firstness of Kamala Harris. And often when we talk about gender and race, we behave as though the only people who have gender and race are people who are not white men. And white men have both gender and race. And so I think it's really important that we keep the performances of all kinds of gender in mind when we speak critically about what's happening on this election stage. That's right. That's right.

80 more days to go until the election. How are you feel-- are you feeling optimistic? What is-- what is the proper healthy way to channel all of these feelings of anger and rage and uncertainty and positivity and joy? Here's the thing.

I believe in faith and hope because I come from working class black people in the deep south who didn't grow up with a lot of possibility, who didn't have a lot of possibility, but who kept getting up every day and trying again. And so it's always the height of a certain kind of access and privilege when I see people assuming that we get the benefit and the indulgence of our cynicism, the indulgence of our disaffection.

what it means to be a black person in this country is that we have to fight every day for new possibilities for ourselves. And I think that that's the lesson that America can take from having a black woman run for the presidency. That is what black people have taught this country, is that if we want it, we have to fight for it. And so let's go. That's where I am. Let's go. So let's go. Can you check out Boogie and Matt?

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Hey everybody, Jon Stewart here. I am here to tell you about my new podcast, The Weekly Show, coming out every Thursday. We're going to be talking about the election, earnings calls. What are they talking about on these earnings calls? We're going to be talking about ingredient to bread ratio on sandwiches. I know you have a lot of options as far as podcasts go, but how many of them come out on Thursday? Listen to The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart wherever you get your podcasts.