The Bewilderment of the Pod Boys
12th November 2024
On a long drive the day after Trump’s victory, after absolutely no sleep, deeply hungover, I turned to liberal radio as a much-needed painkiller. First I tried NPR, but even their coping and seething was too appalling to bear. So I sought out another source: Pod Save America, the famous podcast hosted by three famous former Obama staffers known for being Very Good Boys.
What struck me is how closely the hosts—Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor—conform to a single archetype: that of the effeminate, white, male valedictorian-cum-Brooklyn striver under whose boot we’ve all been stuck for two decades. They are each one a variation on this platonic form, their speech patterns recognizable by the vocal fry that communicates, “I’m safe” while a certain scruffy growl from time to time adds, “but I’m still a guy.”
Members of this class are defined by a very specific perspective. I’ve noticed it ever since first encountering the species in New York in 2007. This perspective accounts for the major difference between what middle-class people teach their kids and what elites teach their kids—what state schools teach their students versus what the Ivys do. You can hear it vividly throughout the episode.
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Yet the solution they come up with is that they need more of a “narrative approach” to “storyelling,” so they can…continue to manipulate people into voting for them. At no point do they address what they actually believe. At no point do they consider that perhaps their beliefs are simply wrong, or perhaps insane, or perhaps completely radical. At no point do they wonder whether the problem might be, not that Democrats aren’t perceived as the party of working people anymore, but that they actually aren’t.