Post-shame politics and the 2024 US Elections – with Daniela Melo (Part1)
There’s a shift in paradigm about what a politician should look like, how they should talk, and what works with […]
There’s a shift in paradigm about what a politician should look like, how they should talk, and what works with […]
There’s a shift in paradigm about what a politician should look like, how they should talk, and what works with the electorate. But post-truth and post-shame politics is not a new phenomenon but one for decades in the making.
It’s been developing alongside several major shifts in the financial markets, the restructuring of labour, the neoliberalism of the 1990s, the deregulation, the deindustrialization processes. The growing acceptance of populist rhetoric has a lot to do with a psychological process of feeling left behind, not feeling seen by the political elites, and seeing an economic consensus between the right and the left that hurts them because their jobs are leaving for China.
Ricardo Silvestre talks to Daniela Melo, lecturer of social sciences at Boston University about the key factors that can decide the US election and discussed what can be described as a “post-trust, post-shame” politics.
Play on SoundCloud or see the full transcript down below the show notes.
Show notes
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
Hello. Hope you’re doing very well this week as we are days away from the United States elections that will be on the 5th of November. We will have two episodes that will focus on some of the topics related to American politics, but also that relate to some tendencies we’re seeing here in the European Union. For that I am joined by Daniela Melo. She’s a lecturer of social sciences at Boston University and also a recurring guest here in our podcast. And in this conversation, we’re going to go into something that we see a lot in the United States, but also more and more here in Europe that can be easily described as a post-truth, post-shame political era. And then for our regular episode on Thursday, Daniela and I are going to go into why some minorities vote for candidates that do not defend their interests. But now, with no further ado, I bring you Daniela Mello. I’m here with our returning champion, Daniela Melo. Daniela, how are you?
I’m doing well, how are you?
I’m doing very well. Thanks so much for coming back to the podcast. It’s always a pleasure to have you back and to talk unavoidably. Since you were here last time, we also talked about the same thing, which is US politics and now heading to the presidential election. Tell me your top-line assessment of what you’re seeing around you.
My top-line assessment is perhaps the same assessment that everyone has heard up to this point, that this is a very tight race. There’s no way around it. Even two weeks after the debate in which Kamala Harris, by most opinion polls, won the debate clearly against Donald Trump. The race has not moved significantly since then. And in fact, if we were to hold the election today, no one with the polls that we have at this moment could predict who would be the winner by the end of the day or if we would have a winner by the end of the day, because we could have a situation in which we need a recount or mail-in votes need to be fully counted as four years ago. So, the truth of the matter is that the swing states are too close to call in most directions.
Now, it is also true that the movement that has in fact happened in the polls over the past two weeks has been favourable to Kamala Harris or more favourable to Kamala Harris than to Donald Trump. But nonetheless, it’s all within the margin of error. And if there’s something that we have all learned over the past eight years is that the polls have had a very hard time deciding how to weigh the data that they’re collecting from the swing states in part because the electorate is shifting so quickly.
But we had polling missing big victories to the left and big victories to the right in the last two cycles. And no one is truly certain whether or not the polling is actually more accurate this time around than last time, or whether we will have the same situation in which we are seeing pollsters perhaps weighing Trump voters too heavily or Kamala Harris too heavily and thus distorting the values. If things remain the same, it’s going to be a long night.
Indeed. There’s a little bit of a sidetrack because I want Daniela to go into some key issues on the election, particularly the women’s vote and then minority votes. But I can’t resist because you’re mentioning that most of the people watching the debate and analysing the debate and pulling the debate clearly give a victory to Kamala Harris. But I’m a little bit worried if this could contaminate also Europe, which is the support systems that candidates have, which, for example, with Donald Trump, the moment that the debate ended and clearly, he left the stage shaken, but the moment he gets to the green room, everybody around him was like, oh, you won the debate. You were so glorious. This was just an amazing performance. And I’m sure that then propels him to tell this lie, which is, I won the debate, clearly won the debate. And I’m wondering if this could be something that we cut up here in Europe, too. What do you think?
There are several things at work here. Donald Trump has, in fact, surrounded himself with yes people, yes men. Right. There’s been an ongoing story about this since he became president. He does not particularly enjoy being confronted. So the process you’re talking about is a process that we’ve seen for a while. But Donald Trump himself has shown or has demonstrated an incredible ability to shape his discourse to the reality that he wants in the world, not necessarily the reality that is out there in the world. That’s a great point indeed. And he’s quite good at it. You know, he’s a great demagogue, and we saw that even immediately after the debate, he goes to the room where all the reporters are, the spin room, right. And he’s telling everyone, even as you know, he’s getting questions fired at him from various journalists about his performance and looking nervous, and he’s just denying it all and saying, no, I did absolutely great. I totally won this debate. There’s no discussion about this. And he has stuck to that line even in the face of every poll to the contrary.
Does it matter? I mean, I think it matters in a greater sense to a discussion about how demagoguery, how this type of populist leader, this type of rhetoric can be used to further polarize the electorate. And can be used to create those information bubbles, right, in which reality is what you want reality to be. And those information bubbles are not led even necessarily by characters like Donald Trump. One of the things that we see happening in the United States is that there’s an infosphere right on the right. I mean, there’s also one on the left. I’m going to focus mostly on the right because we’re talking about Donald Trump, but there’s an infosphere on the left that basically sane washes Donald Trump.
So there’s been mainstream media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times. They’re all wondering, what have we done? Are we responsible for actually making the man sound sane, even when he says things that are completely implausible? And there’s definitely a bit of that. And it’s been a learning curve for journalists over the past few years on how to deal with a leader like that, a political leader like that. But what’s also at work here goes well beyond the sane washing that we see in the mainstream media. What I’ll say is it’s now individuals that are influencers on the right that are really driving the discussion and are presenting right-wing voters, conservative voters, evangelical voters, with a vision of the world and a vision of America in which Donald Trump is the saviour, the political saviour, even the religious saviour of what it means to be an American.
So I’m thinking about individuals like Tucker Carlson, who has one of the most listened to podcasts, is filling whole arenas of paying customers wanting to listen to him rant about the dystopia that America has become, about the great battle in America being not a political battle, but a battle of good versus evil. So it’s that information bubble that has completely free range on what to say, how to say it, where to frame it, that really contributes to the further entrenching of a certain belief system within that information bubble, if that makes sense.
Oh, it makes perfect sense.
We see that completely at work in the United States and we certainly see how so many right-wing and far-right-wing movements across Europe are following and pursuing the same strategies. I mean, we talk quite a lot about how social media has changed the game. Social media has become primarily a tool of amplification of this information bubble. But the fact that we now have individuals who have millions of people listening to their daily podcasts, to their private channels, privately owned by themselves, channels they themselves are making millions producing this type of content, the incentives for them are political, but they’re also economic.
There’s an entire machinery around creating these alternative visions that support somebody like Donald Trump. And when we take a step back and we think about this, it’s easy to see how even if Trump has a really bad performance at a widely watched debate, I think the number was about 67 million people watched the debate. That’s still only about one third of the entire electorate in the United States. The majority of American citizens didn’t watch the debate. They will consume the debate post hoc. Right. They will consume the debate through social media, through their information bubbles, through the influencers within their sphere, through the people they trust. They trust them more than the media, they trust them more than anybody else. And they will in many ways allow passively for their vision of what happened in that debate to be shaped by those they trust within their own circle. And that explains the polarization and the fact that we can have a critical moment in which most of those who watch the debate think, hey, Trump definitely lost this debate. But if you go and you ask Trump supporters, they think that’s all baloney.
Indeed. And we just found out that some of those MAGA influencers that you mentioned, and they have millions of people following them, Tim Pool is one example, Benny Johnson is another. Actually, we just found out not a couple of weeks ago that the DOJ indicted Russian operatives that were actually paying for that MAGA content. But, Daniela, let’s stay here for a couple more minutes because I’m really interested in this, because I’m bringing this up with you because you study this phenomenon, you are someone that is very keen in understanding this kind of process.
I’m a little afraid that in Europe we can also go into this post-truth, but particularly in Europe, this post-shame politics. So, in my opinion, Trump, most of the conservative movement, most of the Republican Party and MAGA are already there, they’re in the post-shame period. So they can easily lie about losing a debate and saying about losing a debate and saying that they won, and that narrative will be taken into the system, as you mentioned, and become dogma. In Europe, we’re not there yet, but we’re moving toward post-truth politics. Do you think, again, as I asked earlier, that this is a global contagion, and that no region – Europe, South America, Africa – will be immune to post-truth, post-shame politics?
What a loaded question! As I was thinking about it, as you were asking the question, I was thinking it’s not Donald Trump who actually is the model for this type of individual. In fact, the first name that comes to mind as somebody who pushed for this new type of political personality—the millionaire who has a lot of lovers, children out of marriage, who will say the most outrageous things but still be elected over and over again—is Silvio Berlusconi. You got it right. And in fact, I think Europe can claim to have the true precursor, the true early riser for this type of political agent, of political character. But it matters if it happens in the United States because the United States is a superpower. In fact, the United States, also because of its two-party system—not officially, but effectively, becomes a two-party system—the polarization is sometimes more obvious and faster because there are only two major blocs and two major candidates.
In Europe, specifically in most European countries, there are multiparty systems, even in those with winner-take-all systems, like the UK, which still have many parties running. You see very similar processes with the emergence of the far right, with the normalization of rhetoric that would have been absolutely unacceptable, unthinkable, 20 or 30 years ago. The type of rhetoric that the AfD is offering in post-Cold War Germany is still shocking many. Right? But to me, it would have been absolutely unthinkable in the 1990s for the AfD to have this type of rhetoric. So there’s been an evolution in the normalization of this type of speech, of this type of leader. And there’s also been—it’s not just happening by contagion, though obviously there’s some of that. It’s happening because the right is organized. This new right emerging in the West is organizing across states. There is actually a transnational movement for the organization of this new right.
Daniela, sorry to interrupt you. Actually, a friend of the podcast, Anne Applebaum, has a book on that. Exactly what you’re saying now, it’s called Autocracy Inc., where she explains what you just mentioned a minute ago.
Wonderful read, that is. Yeah. I mean, it’s a process that has been developing – it’s nothing new. It’s been developing alongside several major shifts in politics, big shifts in the labour market, in the financial markets, the restructuring of labour, the neoliberalism of the 1990s, the deregulation, the deindustrialization processes. Right. We have—well, we have to see the forest, not just the trees, in understanding how we got to this particular point. Right. So deindustrialization, deregulation of markets, all of these things were major shocks to the populations of Europe and the United States. They start with Reagan, they start with Thatcher, but the European Union completely buys into this process as well. Right. What ends up happening in the United States, and in much of Europe, is that a lot of the working class feels left behind. They feel left behind both by the right and by the left.
Yes, there’s also a lot of racism, xenophobia, and neoliberal tendencies.
We can come to that. But those, as I see it, are only a part of the story. They’re not what got that electorate to the point of voting for a Trump or a Le Pen. A lot of it has to do with a psychological process of feeling left behind, not feeling seen by the political elites, and seeing an economic consensus between the right and the left that hurts them because their jobs are leaving for China. Right. And suddenly, there’s also an influx. Well, it’s not sudden. All of these countries have always had migrants, right? But over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a real, truly big wave of migrants and refugees, larger than in previous years. That’s really enhanced that problem.
Let’s think about what happened in Europe, which is also what happened in the United States, since 2008. You have the Great Recession. You have mass movements on the right and on the left trying to advocate for those who were left behind by the economic policies of the 90s and 2000s, the Occupy Wall Street movement, for instance. But you also have the reorganization of this new right that claims it is not neoliberal. This new right is closer to the new left in how they talk about corporations. Corporations don’t have your best interests at heart – there’s this entire narrative around that. And then Europe also sees, because of the conflict in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and other problems south of the European border, a mass wave of refugees coming in all at once. Right. That creates all sorts of new pressures and creates opportunities for new actors to capitalize on what people see right in front of them: race, language, religion, and, to a certain extent, gender.
So, it’s not a simple answer, but it is an answer that involves where that person already is—the person we might label as racist now – but that person is more than just that label. That person likely feels strongly that their job is being lost to someone else, or more opportunities are being given to someone who’s coming in than to someone already there. These are feelings of economic competition but also psychological effects of these major structural changes. People tend to react immediately, perhaps I’m being too kind.
But we’re not going to continue this conversation today; I’ll ask you to come back to the podcast, because while I agree with you, I think there’s a percentage – I’ve been seeing this in Europe too – of people in Hungary, Germany, Spain, Portugal, who don’t have those concerns. Their concern is that they don’t want Black people, Roma, or gay people as their neighbours.
Let me finish this point, because I saw Farage lying openly about money going to the European Union that should go to the National Health Service, or about the migrants supposedly coming from Turkey. All lies. He knew they were lies and had no shame about it. And we just had J.D. Vance in the United States say, “I will make up facts if I need to,” if it helps his political points and he’ll have no shame in it. That was the point I was trying to make.
There’s a shift in paradigm about what a politician should look like, how they should talk, and what works with the electorate. All it takes is someone to break the rules in a way that works to then normalize a new type of behaviour. In that sense, J.D. Vance is just parroting Donald Trump, and he’s done it quite successfully, as he was picked as the vice-presidential candidate after only two years as a senator. This has to do with changing norms and the fact that this new type of right-wing party is counter-normative at that level as well in terms of how a candidate should look and speak. Our Athenian fathers of democracy are rolling in their graves.
This is all for now. I’ll be back soon with more podcasts. You can always visit the website LiberalForum.eu to know more about the activities of the European Liberal Forum. So until the next episode, let’s keep working to make the world a better place.