Is there hope for feminism after Trump? I 1-on-1 with Rebecca Traister

welcome to a special one-on-one interview on the talking feds YouTube channel we're here uh these few days at the Texas Tribune Festival which is overflowing with influential figures from politics and journalism and I'm here with one of them the influential journalist and author Rebecca Tracer Rebecca is a prolific author particularly known for her analyses of politics gender and culture as well as her staunch advocacy for social justice and gender equality besides her thought-provoking articles in the New York Times magazine the cut and The New Yorker she's written three count them three books including most recently the New York Times bestseller good and mad the Revolutionary power of women's anger Rebecca thanks so much for joining us thank you so much for having me I wanted to talk to you about two broad subjects both of which are related to what I see as the overarching theme of this conference which is where do we stand after eight years of trumpism and Maga influence and what concretely do we have to do to restore our political legal and cultural institutions to good health so let me give begin with your recent and very influenced article in the cut entitled the necessity of Hope um and that's in the context of the posts battle to protect Reproductive Rights so um hope uh you know is the word that really catches attention you could read it as a sort of you know more chin up uh kind of almost simple-minded exhortation you know pep talk I don't think that's however how you certainly not how iine hope so can you explain uh your sense of hope and why you view it as necessary yeah um thanks for having me by the way it's a pleasure to be here and absolutely I'm glad you said that that it can because I I believe that I wrote the necessity of Hope the afternoon of the do's decision which you know and and because of the nature of what I cover it's not that the dobs decision was a surprise of course everybody was just you know with any Supreme Court decision you don't know if it's going to be that morning so um but I absolutely knew it was coming I was not planning on writing about it in fact I told my editors that I wasn't going to um why not well I mean that's Tal actually I I will tell you I had said when dos was being argued I told my editors I really didn't want to write about the Dos case at all I didn't want to write about the arguments which was you know had preceded in the fall I think December um of 2021 i' said I don't want to write about this and I was I was having a little bit of a baby T temper tantrum about it was not a mature choice but um I'm somebody I'm not an abortion beat columnist right I'm not on the ground and I want to make that really clear but I've been writing about this issue politically logistically um how abortion is an issue that's tied into so many other crucial policy and political choices that are made I'd written about it personally I'd written I've written about it from every angle for as long as I've been a journalist that I could that I could think of right without without overstating that like I'm on the ground at clinics I'm not they journalist doing that work and it's tremendous that's not the work I do but I'd written about it in the context of presidential Politics the Supreme Court i' i' I'd done it for so long and being a journalist who writes about a lot of different things I also cover the campaign of Hillary Clinton I write about politicians on State and local levels I write about movement politics and I write about abortion and I can tell you that over the past whatever 15 or 20 years that I've been writing about abortion nobody ever wanted to talk about the pieces I wrote about abortion nobody wanted to talk about it so you know if I wrote a profile not even like of Hillary Clinton but of some you know of of Susan Collins or Andrew Cuomo or you know I would get invitations to go on cable news to go on NPR you know you you do the circuit right I wrote books and I did publicity around them like I you know nobody I'd never get those calls about my abortion story people didn't want to hear about the abortion story and this was this was a structural problem this is part of how we got here there were a lot of people in a lot of places who did not want to deal with the fact that roie Wade was going to be overturned I'd spent my career writing these pieces and being told that Not only was I was being hysterical I was overstating the case I was being over dramatic as a single issue person which I am not right I don't see abortion as a single issue at all um and nobody wanted to talk about it even then because at that point in my coder of Supreme Court types the sky surely was falling of course if you were paying attention you knew the sky was falling I mean if you were paying attention you knew the sky was falling when Mitch McConnell was refusing to fill the seat right if you were paying attention you knew the sky was falling when the Tea Party came to power claiming that their agenda was about tax policy and then voting every day to defund planed Parenthood right there was the sky has been falling for a long time and my experience of having tried to write about it was that nobody actually wanted to be told this guy was falling and would denigrate those who were trying to say it as being fundamentally over dramatic and hysterical hyper feminized single issue wines okay so so I had said when dos was being argued which I also understood as I think a lot of people did this okay this is the form it's going to take right it's like the state Puff Marshmallow Man and Ghostbusters this is the form that this is going to take okay right um I had told editors in a sort of baby temper tantrum it really is a immature thing I was like I'm not no because now everybody's going to want to talk about it and it's too late now I had gone back on that promise even after the do's argument in December and I had written a column about it and then the do's decision came and I found myself thinking about Hope like in a really kind of animal way that day again it wasn't a surprise it was the opposite of a surprise but you know the sort of outpouring of shock and despair even after a decision to been leaked um you know two months earlier there was so much because we'd been told the guy wasn't falling for so long there was such shock such how could they do this how could it be real even the people in between the leaked decision and the actual decision saying no no Roberts is never going to go for it he's going to take the middle path which by the way was never a middle path as you know it was it was gutting row right you know I'm not um but that kind of denialism that don't worry it's going to be not as bad as you think and then having it be not only bad as you think but also have Clarence Thomas's concurrence saying also Lawrence Griswald oberfeld right um those were all mistakes we need to correct and the sort of shock of it that I was getting from of course my phone was ringing off the hook the all these media sources that had never wanted to talk about any abortion coverage before we're suddenly like can you get on the phone what what happens what do we do now how could this have happened and so I found myself thinking about hope as logistically crucial crucial truly logistically not pretty hearts and flowers don't worry it's going to be okay no the only way to make it better to do the work to actually reverse the horror of what has just been decided today but had been building for decades is to have hope that you can make change right and this applies across many issues and it's a lesson that I've learned as a journalist you know I came into journalism with very little actually education in the history of the stuff that I cover I had not studied social movements I hadn't even studied I hadn't taken a what was used to be called a women's studies class now gender studies When I Was An undergraduate I didn't have background a lot of this has come from my own and when I started as a journalist I covered current events right it was like what happened today and maybe what's going to happen tomorrow and I had to learn a lot of history on on my way to writing the books that I've written and writing the articles that I that I write and I began to get the longer scope of how progress has been made and then eroded and reversed and then made again and how the fights are Generations in the making and how there are so many paths to wage the fights right that there's there's political there's legislative there's activists like there's so many different things that have to happen and they happen over generations and so and I think a thing that I have noticed perhaps being born at the I was born in 1975 at the end of a period of tremendous legal and political change and upheaval in this country which we've now seen the right-wing dedicate the you know almost 50 years that I've been alive to reversing right there was a sense that things were fixed right we changed these things I was raised on that sense I was raised and I think a lot of the people who were so shocked on the day of Dos were were raised to think we had fixed these things we fixed voting rights obviously we did not we fixed abortion we fixed contraception we fixed marriage equality none of those things were fixed that was a fairy tale we were sold but so if you've been raised on that fairy tale and absorbed it what do you do when it's destroyed in front of you but if you also don't have the history that's been transmitted to you of how long and how many iterations of those fights got us to even that mid 20th century point of being purportedly fixed right what does it mean and and I think we've seen from a lot of other writers and thinkers the reex reexploration of reconstruction for example right I reconstruction seems to come up so often in these last 8 to 10 years precisely because it was another period in which there was this tremendous remaking of the nation and then it's absolute reversal and people who were born at a certain point in reconstruction this thing that people now like to say for example about abortion you know oh my daughter's going to going to die in a country where I have fewer rights than when I was born this is not unique this has happened in the United States before this happened to generations of people who were born you know in reconstruction and died at the height of Jim Crow you know and I think that's but we are not taught that history because we are taught a triumphalist version of America's social progress and the and the changes that have been made we are taught a a very curtailed like a film strip version of a Civil Rights Movement we are often not even taught how long it was between the bus boycott and the passage of the Voting Rights Act let alone you know the women who preceded Rosa Parks and refusing to get off the bus you know we're not taught about you know you may be Tau about senica Falls in 1848 and that only one person who attended senica Falls actually lived to cast a ballot um in 1920 after the passage of the 19th Amendment which we know didn't include wasn't even full you know that there was another 45 years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act that would secure black women's rights to vote that the scope of what it means to go from 1848 to 1920 to 1965 we're not ever taught that scope of History struggles in real time it looks like they just happened you just you they show the Highlight Reel right I I I clerked for thur Good Marshall and he uh you know everyone thinks about 1954 but you learned over the course of that year you know at 30 40 year ups and downs and overall strategy and of it's right okay but so bringing it home now when you experience something like that day of shock as many millions of people experienc that they can't believe that this has happened and that feeling of wait a thing I thought was fixed is gone well how do you move forward because you can't stand there in stasis and think it's done it's over because the reality is when you start to think about what it takes what it could take the various paths moving forward from this yeah right and is a Supreme Court decision it's been reversed and and you're looking around and what do you do to put one foot in front of the other and that's where hope is is a utility and and by the way my thinking there is is actually really influenced by Mariam cabba um who is a prison industrial complex abolitionist um and that is the notion she writes about this all the time hope is a practice hope is a it's a strategy it's a necessity and it's not hearts and flowers it's if you do not believe things can get better then you're not going to do the work that you that absolutely has to be done in order to make them better they're not going to become passively better no DSX Machina is going to descend from the sky and fix everything that has been broken over the past 50 years and that will be broken in the years to come we are looking at a lot more losses potentially all right so but let me zero in on the post dos period where I think you know aside from that how you like to play Mrs Lincoln but given but given dos itself quite a lot has happened in the in the politic iCal firment over the last year were you encountering at the time or do you feel you're encountering now people who in fact are um as you've now described hope uh hopeless or the I mean did you feel like you were putting your shoulder to the wheel and pushing up hill cuz I I my sense is of a pretty uh invigorated movement in the wake of in the wake of dobs in the wake of dobs well so I think there's a I think there are a lot of different answers to that question there are absolutely every day I hear from people who say I can't believe this has happened what do we do now and and also say a version of I can't believe my daughters have fewer rights than I had when I was right I hear a lot of that um I think it's really important to acknowledge that even under row there were like lots of people born who did not have access to those kinds of services and we've never done a great abs well absolutely and that those and that the the rights purportedly protected by row had been eroded tremendously even in the past 20 years depending on what state you were in via the Trap laws and state restrictions but so I I do encounter a lot of that and then you also have losses like affirmative action right you have there going to be big legal losses moving forward and there is this sense of like it's all being taken away it is also true that you there have been electoral wins that have been unexpected for all kinds of people who prognosticate these things right State wins on ballot referenda midterm wins right the midterms was going to be a Wipeout for Democrats and instead you had that they only lost they kept house losses to single digits which is remarkable um flipped the chambers in in Pennsylvania and in Michigan you saw res Pennsylvania reaffirmed that it's my home state but that's right Republican run Republicans Running Scared in some many places like the dog who caught the car right I think both parties are the dogs that caught the car in different ways because I do think having written about Democratic politicians for a long time there is not fluency in terms of how they talk there there's a generation of people who especially over the past 10 to 15 years have gotten really good at talking about abortion um in a in a very because it's fundamentally authentic to them but there is a generation and it's a generation that is still largely in leadership that still treats it like with enormous fear and of course there's a whole battery of Consultants who still are fearful about it they don't know how to talk about it fluently and with and so the Democratic party speaking broadly not about individuals who've done like you know whitmer's a great example there there are state and local legislators all around the country who do this so well but um by and large the Democratic party is also the dog that caught the car because they have an incredibly activated majority that has clearly shown itself much to their own surprise uh willing to vote on this issue but they don't have the language at hand because they let the right the anti-abortion right over decades gobble up all that language of life and family values and Faith all of which of course could truthfully be applied to Reproductive Rights Health Care justice but the Democratic party historically doesn't have practice doing that so they're alsoo I guess right well no it should have my argument I'm very critical of how Democrats have handled abortion for the decades in in between row and now but um but then you also have the Republican party which is a dog that caught the car from a different angle because they got what they wanted which is wildly unpopular and they have majorities opposing them in every instance but they're also tied to a base I mean in making a deal around gaining power on AB on opposition to abortion they built a rabid base that will not let them back away from it and so they're really caught in a bind as well because they're not I mean you know this is both parties are facing terrain that's very unfamiliar to them post dubs and in the meantime you still have pregnant people bleeding out in parking lots so it's not as though like ooh this is an interesting political problem like hm what's going to happen next well what's happening right now is people are not able to access the care that they need and we're seeing dire results so and and actually let me this was the one aspect I want to talk because I think it is distinctive about your um work tell me if I'm if I'm being too fasel here but you're quite attuned to the need for feminism r large to focus more broadly than on you know just uh Elite mainly white and well-to-do women and this problem is and has been now since the height Amendment you know so so much more experienced On The Ground by you know uh wh women of color young women women who don't have uh means so it it seems to me that this aspect what's really happening on the ground very much dubv tales with an emphasis with the a point you've been making for some time about uh I need to sort of broaden the scope of uh feminism to today is that fair it's absolutely fair and I mean I take a lot of my you know my thoughts on this have been shaped tremendously by a reproductive Justice movement which is distinct from what was called a Reproductive Rights Movement or the pro-choice movement um because a reproductive Justice movement led by women of color over decades has been the one to point out that you can't even there's a weird thing that happened post row which is that the pro-choice movement as they called themselves was simultaneously super euphemistic not even using a word abortion but also mono focused on abortion right they didn't want to say the word but that's fundamentally all it was about and um a reproductive Justice movement always pointed out that the notion of choice was meaningless when you're talking about like lack of access to all kinds of things that would make any choices about family life whether that means uh how good you know safe housing safe schools Criminal Justice Reform um access to health care of all kinds you know that that all of these things access to Transportation right all the things that we deprive uh poor people of in this country by the the hollowing out over these same 50 years of the social safety net and and Welfare benefits and we're in Texas there are people who live in Texas who just getting to a state isn't you know that where you can have and that's true all over the country there are these tremendous deserts in the South um and it's also for people who want to who do want to have to continue pregnancies are they going to have safe housing are they going to have health care they can get for their kids are they going to have access to maternal we have a maternal mortality crisis in this country which of course is experienced exponentially more by women of color people of color um and and poor people um are they going to be able to safely deliver wanted pregnancies you know there are all these questions before you even get to to this question of do I have choices in this um and that's you know that's what I've learned from a reproductive Justice movement that has often operated sometimes in tandem with and often critically about the Reproductive Rights movement and so yes I see all these things as tied together I don't believe it's possible to Silo out one issue and by the way something I've learned specifically about abortion advocacy moving forward if you talk about the so-called Green Wave in in Central and South America where actually abortion has has been decriminalized um most recently in Mexico in the case in some cases it's been done by courts in some cases it's been done with El electoral component where people had to vote on it one of the things that I learned in my reporting is that in fact people were more likely to vote on abortion when there was a connection made between abortion and the other issues at stake whether that's you know Health Care climate democracy preservation or reform to understand abortion is completely woven into the fabric of all these other policy priorities because of course as many of us know from lived experience abortion is woven into our lives you know all kinds of questions Health Care Providers a pregnant young woman comes in there's just a lot to talk about here ra yes and not yet which including in places where they're actually banned from saying the a word and yet there's a there's a woman in front of them that has presents a panoply of health issues um I feel like we've gotten very far away from the question of Hope but I'm sorry I took us on a journey no no no it's all very good but I mean we' we've used it as a prism into uh stuff of of great current concern I actually was hoping to move somewhat from uh your Strike Zone if you call it that to mine I might wh but we'll try exactly um good for you for keeping up with sports metaphors I always feel like as a I used to cover Sports I like sports fine but man pundits like me they just really o over rely on them that's also farfield here's but here is something that's not farfield for me and from the for the conference I think of this conference which is quite the confab of you know of of people and panels as roughly focused on the notion of you know is there trumpism after Trump what what what needs to be done um other than I me you know we're at a Crossroads and should he win you know I I may move to New Zealand but I mean we might as well think about the the happier possibility that he doesn't you've said and it's front and center with what I think about every day so I want to get your thought and maybe engage a conversation in a in a article from a few months back the dangerous fantasy of Trump's indictment I cannot share the pleasures of Trump's arrest and I we could revise that now of Trump's arrests a hard word to say is an arrests more than that I'm alarmed by it by them why do you find it alarming well I've been alarmed by the mono focus on Trump and that's not to say that what happens to Trump isn't important right I don't want to take away from from the real you know why it is important these prosecutions and the kind of legal consequences that he might face for him to not face legal consequences would be dire okay so I I want to put that out there but I as a member of the political media and you know my own sort of Social and family networks I have been alarmed for a really long time before he was since before he was elected on the focus on Trump as the problem yeah because you know you asked will trumpism continue after Trump regardless of what happens this this coming cycle I think trumpism what we call trumpism existed before Trump became a candidate I associate the far right turn in the party which he somehow embodied in particularly visible and vulgar ways he made it all visible right but if you were covering the tea party and the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 you understood and there was a there was a willingness on the part of many in the political media to say no no no it's an econom their priorities are like tax policy and stuff well they were voting to defund Planned Parenthood every day so there you know they were if you looked at what was happening in terms of the voter roles I I noted Brian Kemp as a guest here at the Tribune Festival right if you were looking at what was happening in Georgia if you were looking at what was happening you know the hard if you were if you were paying attention to Mitch McConnell and the hard right Republican parties's grab of a of a supreme court seat um from a sitting president a lot of the things that people blame Trump for like the perversion of the systems the the breakdown of democracy you can't tell me that that wasn't happening before he was elected president when the Republican party was stealing Supreme Court seats from Barack Obama you can't tell me that that wasn't happening to some degree in 2000 when a Supreme Court decided the election the Republican party has been tremendously strategic over a period of decades in a way that Democratic Party hasn't been that kind of returning briefly to this question of why hope and why you put one foot in front of the other when it seems like everything is lost you're looking at a Republican party that thought a lot was lost in the middle to end of the 20th century and started strategizing in such a brilliant way taking over every school board every state legislature every city council um building a Judicial a pipeline of Judges strategizing on how to take advantage of the democratic systems that were in place and pervert certain other ones to gain a strangle hold on the courts on voter roles being able to gerrymander districts being able to gain power either by exploiting the systems that were built to you know to offer power especially to a sort of capitalist white patriarchal power structure and breaking the ones that were while being a functional minority exact yes minority rule investing in minority rule all of that was well underway before Donald Trump descended his like golden escalator or whatever he did to announce that he was running for president all right so and now bringing that home now to your sense of alarm yes because what I described earlier in the conversation about the sort of placid belief that we fix things I believe a lot of the same impulses can be applied to the Celebration that people want to feel if like if Trump is convicted if he loses it's not done right because the party that he whose intentions he made particularly vulgar and visible still wields enormous power in States look we're in Texas right now you know I have written about how you know for example abortion as an issue can be used to win elections we've seen it on ballot referendums in Kentucky and Kansas places people didn't expect just most recently in Ohio Wisconsin but look at what's happening for example in Wisconsin where there was a massive win for the state supreme court judge who was explicit about her intentions around abortion and the voting Maps right and they're try they're threatening every day to impeach this woman to literally break democracy that's a state government in Wisconsin because she made her position clear because she made her position clear elction yes but she won record turnout massive win that is absolutely subverting democracy Jamal Buie wrote an incredible column about that in the New York Times so that's Wisconsin in Texas you know this this idea that abortion is winning elections that's not true here look the things that are happening in Texas the things that are happening in Florida and it's certainly not just about abortion it's about it's about education it's about book bands it's about the you know all kinds of new vigilante laws and state travel can you travel out of state they're trying everything and this is again what the Republican party has been doing for years and to just look at abortion as an example they were coming up with all these creative ideas about things that make no medical sense can we close down clinics because their hallways aren't wide enough yes they could can we force people to doctors to give misinformation about false links between abortion and breast cancer yes they could do that in States this was none of this has to do with Donald Trump yeah it all preceded Donald Trump he's not actually smart up to do any of that stuff that none of it would would be humiliated or secured by his none of it is going to be it's important right and I worry I worry also as a political reporter who saw the ways in which people who you know sort of were ambivalent about or might have distanced themselves from Trump although nobody's quite brave enough to totally distance themselves from Trump right you have the Mitt Romney the Susan Collins right cont all they kind are are far are craving about but a political media my peers who are willing to say oh Brian Kemp's a real hero because you know he wouldn't commit and I know this is actually I don't mean to just be paring Stacy Abrams line but it is true something she said about him when she was running against him during the midterms was great he didn't commit treason but there was a sense in which anybody who wasn't Trump was a moderate that is not the case Brian Kemp is not a moderate and yet that framing because we have picked out Trump is some special category of bad because he's vile and he disgusts Us in some ways I think he's incredibly valuable in terms of that because he makes this stuff that that is otherwise invisible obvious and undeniable the racism the the the ugliness the the antipathy to others the open disdain for women all of that stuff was made more visible by him but these are tendencies that have informed and motivated his party over decades and I fear that in thinking that he's the problem and not the party that you know he wants again to head and where he's still running the table nobody's gonna nobody's G to win against this guy right that's not just special Donald Trump that's the party and and we have a fantasy that if we get rid of him we'll solve the problem and in the mean time we're making people like Brian Kemp look like Heroes and and he's beating Stacy Abrams and this is this is a real pernicious danger moving forward we cannot without wanting to take away people's it is also important to celebrate wins and I know strategically talk about Hope and the necessity of hope you also have to take moments when there are wins whether they're small whether they're right to say look at what we just did and it doesn't solve the whole problem but it's a good thing and we want to feel good because we don't want our lifetimes given to fighting you know fascism autocracy whatever you want to say to be these endless slogs of misery and having to grasp for Hope in Dark Places no when you have wins you want to feel good so I don't want to discourage people from feeling like this is terrific if a person who has you know committed terrible sins against democracy is held legally accountable great there should we should feel good about that but what we don't want to get lulled into because we're all so scared is thinking that we made the threat go away if we get rid of this one guy he is not the whole threat that's where I come into that all right so I yeah I think I understand very well then exactly what you mean uh such a pleasure talking to you I've wanted to do it for a while I hope you'll you'll come back uh will the things we're talking about are they're not going away but I appreciate your time thank you so much for having me thanks for tuning in if you enjoyed this video and other talking feds content please take a second to like And subscribe talk to you later