Passing the Trump Test

with Hamish McKenzie

“I’m going to vote for Biden in the 2020. But you shouldn’t believe me when I say that, because if I did intend vote for Trump, I would never tell you.”

That’s the formulation I developed in response to 2020’s most loaded question. While my answer did extract me from some potentially awkward conversations, that wasn’t its purpose exactly. It was a way of maintaining plausible deniability in an atmosphere where Trump and his followers were and are often regarded as monsters. At the same time, I meant to point out that, within our deeply polarized political environment, such a seemingly simple question no longer serves as mere conversation fodder but as a test to which there is a “right” and a “wrong” answer, indicating whether one is a “good” or a “bad” person.

I don’t much appreciate being subjected to interrogation, nor do I think it’s a good sign that answering the most basic political question in the same way that nearly half the country does can get you ejected from polite society. More and more questions—many of them just as simple as “Who did you vote for?”—now function similarly, as moral tests rather than innocent inquiries. As I tell Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in the following excerpt from our recent conversation, this state of affairs did not emerge spontaneously. There are plenty of people trying to win elections and to make lots of money who benefit from our worsening political tribalism. A good analysis of Trump’s popularity could start there rather than with virtue signaling.

So did I actually vote for Trump? Of course not! But then again, why would you believe me?

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HAMISH MCKENZIE: Does it ever cause you to rethink what you might say, positions you might take given the intensity of the blowback sometimes?

GLENN LOURY: Well, yeah. During the 2020 election season, I had a formula which was, I'm going to vote for Biden. But you shouldn't believe me, because if I were going to vote for Trump, I would never tell you. So if you ask me who I'm gonna vote for, there's no information in my response. You asked me who I'm gonna vote for, I'm gonna vote for Biden. You should have no change of your prior estimate who I'm voting from the fact that I said that, because there's really only one answer to that question.

So where does Glenn stand on Trump? Because one of my points that I've been making over and over again in conversation with John McWhorter—who very forthrightly, as a good New Yorker, denounces Trump at every opportunity: “He's a moron, he's an idiot, he's whatever”—is that, hey man, like 45% of the population think he should be president. I mean, maybe we ought to think about why they think that. Maybe we shouldn't reduce our reaction to Trump down to a personal evaluation of his character. And we should think a little bit more broadly about the structures of America. The tectonic plates, is my metaphor, that are shifting under our feet in American culture and in politics, of which ascendancy of Trump is one manifestation.

And when we reduce our evaluation of this phenomenon to an assessment of his character, we're giving short shrift to the sentiments of those many, many millions who think that he is representing them. He's their tribune, that kind of thing. That's as far as I would allow myself to go into the “Oh, you're a Trump apologist” world.

Now many people, some of them dear friends of mine, some of them I actually live with, are saying, “Why are you not more vociferously denouncing this monstrous imposition on American democracy?” And I'm being invited to perform. “You got a platform. People follow you, people respect you,” they say. And they do. “Glenn, you're brilliant. Glenn, you should run for president.'“ I get these kind of comments. “You should be using your platform to denounce this gangster and thug and moron and whatever.” And I refuse to do it. I do that cautiously. I mean, I am saying just as much as I dare say that's favorable to Trump's, and I dare not say anything further, even if I think it. Maybe that would be the kiss of death.

So I'm managing my brand, I must confess, by carefully selecting how it is that I react to the Trump phenomenon so as to be able to maintain plausible deniability.

I'll preface this with, you would get a lot of points if you did denounce Trump. In the circles that people like you and me find ourselves in, you know, the elite institutional circles in the media, there's a lot of anti-Trump sentiment, to put it mildly. And so you would get points for denouncing him. It's a hard position to take, even to go for neutrality. What gives you the courage to stand up for the more neutral position, to stand up for the position where you don't reflexively denounce Trump?

I can't answer that. I don't know. I appreciate that you think I'm courageous. Thank you. Where that character trait of mine comes from, I'm not sure I can say. I can report to you that I hate to be bullied. Don't tell me what to think and don't tell me what to say, you know? So you want to call me a name? Call me a name. But if you want to change my mind, you had better make an argument, and it had better be a good one. This kind of thing. So I don't like crowds. I don't like herds. I don't like to wave banners. I don't care that much for virtue signaling as a practice. And you know, yeah, I was a black, Reaganite conservative in the 1980s.

Not a hugely popular position?

Yeah, that was very unpopular in a lot of quarters. I got denounced by my own children.

What did that feel like?

It felt really, really terrible, actually. Because I said, look, respect me enough to give me the latitude to think for myself. We don't have to agree, but that doesn't make me a bad person. And maybe you ought to stop and listen. There might be a certain amount of wisdom here after all these decades of life. I have reasons for taking the positions that I do. Maybe you ought to sit back and think about it. Don't be so arrogant. Don't think you know everything. You're not that smart.

Of course, I wouldn't say it like that. But you know, it's all good. We're happily ensconced, as you know. I have five children, six grandchildren, and we get together with the their spouses and whatnot every year on the Outer Banks, North Carolina for a week of bonding and all of that. And it's all good.

Is that a theme? That seems to commonly come up now in the sort of social media climate that I spend a lot of my time trying to escape but failing to escape. The idea that, because you hold a politically different position, you must be somehow bad or morally wrong. Forty-five percent of America would vote for Donald Trump to be the president. And a lot of the response to that from the quarters where I spent a lot of my time is that those 45% must be bad in some way. Same was happening to you with the discussions with your children about supporting Reagan, by the sound of it.

Yeah. Way back.

Is that just a fact of life? Is it changing in any way?

Well, I think it's changing. Again, I don't have chapter and verse on that. I'm not an academic studying that in a systematic way. But I think we have become much more siloed and much more divided into camps who have a hard time talking to one another. I was just reading Matt Taibbi's book, Hate, Inc. And I was very impressed by it. I haven't quite finished, but I'm about halfway through it.

First serialized on Substack and then turned into a paperback.

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Yeah, I have the paper back now. I didn't see it when when he was putting these posts up. But he has an analysis there about the interaction between media and political aspirants and how things get framed. I think that the social media evolution factors into that, because it becomes very easy to the algorithms, I suppose, of recommended things. It helps you just go to the sites and read the stuff that you wanna read and talk to the people that you want to talk to who agree with you. And then demonization of the other side follows pretty naturally, and nuance suffers as a result.

Well, it's very difficult to do the opposite. Your own kids were denouncing you, or disagreeing with you at least. It's hard to take the independent position, it seems.

Yeah, I guess that's right. I've tried to have people on the show who challenge me. And my wife, LaJuan, my lovely wife, has encouraged me in this regard. I had Cornel West on the show, and we had a wonderful conversation. I've had Briahna Joy Gray on the show. I had Richard Wolff, the Marxist economist, on the show. These are people that come at the issues that I'm concerned about rather differently than I do. But I'm proud to be able to say that I can have cordial and productive conversations with them. And I intend to do more of that.

So given your experience with political discourse over the decades, and given what you see happening now with social media and perhaps other aspects of publishing sort of intensifying tribalism, and given what you are experiencing when you have these kind of across-the-aisle conversations on The Glenn Show, are you optimistic or pessimistic or somewhere in between when it comes to how discourse is going, how we might evolve as a culture?

Yeah, it's a big question. Maybe I'm gonna say pessimistic, because we are so polarized. I mean to the point where large numbers of people question the outcome of elections. And that can go in both directions, by the way. I mean, Trump lost the most recent election for president, and he's a election denier—and his followers—to the extent that they don't acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden's election.

But believe me, that's not over. There will be other elections. There will be different outcomes, and it's like the cat is out of the bag now on this. It becomes okay to deny the legitimacy of the only process that we have for actually adjudicating these political disputes. So if you can't settle it within an institutional framework where everybody accepts the rules, and when they win, great, and when they lose, well, too bad but we'll carry on. If you can't do that, well, what's left? Gangs of thugs in the street banging away at each other?

Or as Matt Taibbi says, the person who disagrees you has to be Hitler. There's nothing short of Hitler. And then if they're Hitler, well, anything you can do to defeat Hitler is legitimate. And that's worrying. That's very worrying.

On the other hand, it is possible to have a conversation with just about anybody instantly and to send it out to millions of people, and that's really pretty cool. So I don't blame the medium for the fact that it can abet partisan polarization and division, because it can also facilitate a different kind of discourse. And, you know, there are actors here. Taibbi focuses on the commercial interests of of the media. Political parties are also organizing, raising large amounts of money using social media to raise the money, fund their candidates and their campaigns. They have an interest.

The negative campaigning is the way to go now. So many people are doing it. And I assume negative campaigning is easier to do when you can put a message in everybody's email inbox to tell them about how horrible, the world is coming to an end. The world will end tomorrow if you don't give me $14,

Fourteen dollars standing between you and the end of democracy.

Yeah, exactly. And the same kind of thing coming from the other side. I mean, you know, both sides are doing it.

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