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Taken seriously, the content of these posts is deeply offensive and dehumanizing. But the people sharing them get to hide behind a thin veil of irony: They’re just some funny cats. If you’re offended, that’s your problem

Trump is well versed in this tactic—he routinely attempts to walk right up to the edge of plausible deniability. Consider, for example, the time he floated the idea of executing one of his top generals

this behavior has been called doing it “for the lulz.” As Adrian Chen chronicled in The Nation in 2014, lulz—a perversion of lol—justifies heinous behavior online. The term came out of the bowels of 4chan in the mid-aughts and typically means maniacally laughing at a victim. It has often been associated with jokes about topics such as the Holocaust, suicide, terrorism, and rape

post-liberalism. And I think that’s a very important term here. It’s also a loosely defined one. And that comes from people like law professor Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, who is a political theorist at Notre Dame. And they basically take an argument or vision of the world that challenges liberalism’s emphasis on the individual. Instead of saying the state is meant to be an engine for individual self-fulfillment or to allow people to live life as best they want it, they argue that there’s a shared telos, a purpose, a common good to politics. And for them, it’s primarily defined by Catholic doctrine, and the purpose of politics should be moving us toward that goal. And part of that envisions the nation almost as an organic whole rather than a series of discrete individuals making choices. So it’s the question of what is good for the body politic as a unit, and that includes perpetuity, survival, children — hence the natalism that’s so important in Vance’s thought.

You’ve made this point about the differences between what you call sort of the neopatriarchy right and the Barstool conservatism right. And the Barstool conservatism right has been a little less excited about some of what it is hearing from Vance. Can you walk through the difference there?

The neopatriarchal right, the one that Vance has really aligned itself with, is a group that says a major focus of the state should be on fostering traditional morality and family formation. They don’t explicitly say women shouldn’t be working most of the time — though sometimes they do — but it basically means an emphasis on traditional loosely defined family structure. So you got to have kids, you got to get married, you shouldn’t be having sex out of marriage, birth control is probably bad. You can see some of this in the book by the head of the Heritage Foundation, which JD Vance wrote the foreword to. The publications have been delayed, but some of the excerpts have leaked, and he makes exactly this kind of argument about birth control specifically and other family planning choices.

the importance of the news stories that flood our lives: Which ones will historians still be talking about in 50 years? Are there any that they’ll be talking about in 100?

yes. Without question, historians will be discussing the Russia-Ukraine war even 100 years from now. It’s a bloody slugfest between two advanced nations in Europe that has immense strategic implications for the United States (and the world)

It’s a struggle that’s changing the nature of warfare — with its mass use of drones and other new technologies — and it could alter the global balance of power, especially if Western will fails and Russia overwhelms Ukraine.

the essence of the Joe Rogan brand: He is bawdy around his fans, respectful of his wife, loyal to his friends, and indulgent with his golden retriever, who has 900,000 followers on Instagram. He maintains a self-deprecating sense of humor that’s rare among men who could buy an island if they wanted one

His politics defy easy categorization—he hates Democratic finger-wagging but supports gay marriage and abortion rights. (“I’m so far away from being a Republican,” he said on a podcast in 2022.) He voted for a third-party candidate in 2020, and in early August expressed his admiration for Robert F. Kennedy Jr

He sees himself as an outsider, nontribal, just an average Joe. The best way to think of him, one of my friends told me, is as if “Homer Simpson got swole.”

it strikes me that there is a missing question in the debate, one which commentators—including me—might be avoiding in part because they have a less developed answer to it.

Donald Trump is not especially popular. Most Americans continue to believe that both he and the party he has shaped in his own image are too extreme.

the simple truth is that Hispanics have also swung to Trump in the overwhelmingly Mexican-American districts of southern Texas or the heavily Puerto Rican neighborhoods of New York City.

part of the basic confusion of that little cultural moment was to suppose that snark (reflexive, dismissive negativity) and smarm (treacly positivity in which power might hide) were antonyms. But Millennial snot demonstrates that they were always kissing cousins, easily integrated, two complementary spices begging to be added to the same chowder.

Millennial snot is smarmy in that it depends on the speaker’s certainty that they are the good, righteous being in every exchange, and it is snarky in that it operates under a logic of being limitlessly disaffected, an asserted perpetual superiority that’s always believed to be apparent to everyone. It’s a simulation of being witty and cutting the way people are in movies, impressed with the self and literally nothing else, like asking ChatGPT to make you into the cool kid at the back of the class that you’ve always longed to be. Millennial snot so easily integrates two supposedly opposed approaches to communicative integrity because it’s the vocabulary of people who have no particular interest in integrity. They simply want to feel powerful, if however briefly, if only in insincere and meaningless online exchanges.

The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply are the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life.

In baseball, they often say that a losing pitcher played “good enough to win.” The idea here is that the pitcher can’t win games by himself, because he doesn’t score runs. All he can do is put his team in a position to win by holding the other team’s offense in check.

So a pitcher who gives up 1 run in 9 innings and loses 1–0? That’s not on him. He pitched good enough to win. It was the team that let him down by not providing run support.

That’s basically how I feel about the Harris campaign as we start closing arguments. She put America in a position to win by running a smart, vigorous campaign and giving the country a clear choice between a physically decrepit, mentally unfit gangster and a young, viable, centrist vice president.

The outcome of the election, it almost goes without saying, puts America on a right-wing populist path, inching ever closer toward a form of autocratic rule rarely, if ever, seen in the nation’s history.

Trump’s campaign was openly racist, xenophobic and authoritarian and his supporters appear to be willing to jettison democracy in support of an autocratic demagogue who promises to “fix everything” while pandering to their angers, resentments and prejudices.

Fukuyama went on to say:The move of the working class to the Republicans is now much more entrenched. For Blacks and Hispanics voting for Trump, class was much more important than identity, and Democrats failed to understand that. I really think that the importance of the transgender issue was underappreciated by the Democrats. They simply thought it was the latest civil rights issue when the actual policy was really crazy and offensive to working class voters.