Deep Dive with Shawn C. Fettig

Talk Isn’t Cheap: The High Cost of Lies and Gossip in Political Discourse (w/ Dr. Christopher Elias)

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What if the very tools meant to inform and unify us are actually tearing our democracy apart? In this episode, we explore how gossip, rumor, and disinformation are used as tools in American politics, especially in the Trump era, to distort truth and threaten democracy. I chat with historian Dr. Christopher Elias, author of Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politicss of Insinuation, to unravel the intricate and often nefarious role of gossip, rumor, and misinformation in American politics. Discover how political figures like Donald Trump, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Roy Cohn have weaponized these tactics to manipulate public opinion, sidestep substantial policy debates, and undermine trust in our institutions.

We discuss the role of bad information in American politics from Alexander Hamilton to the present day with figures like Donald Trump and JD VAnce, and revealing how advances in media technology have transformed political gossip into a powerful tool for shaping narratives. We consider the ethical implications of these tactics and the enduring impact of figures like Trump, JD Vance, and the Republican Party who have brought them to unprecedented levels, reshaping U.S. politics and public discourse. Learn about the nuanced differences between gossip, rumor, and insinuation, and how each serves its purpose in this strategic manipulation. 

As we explore the broader implications for democracy, underscoring the critical need for truth and communal trust in safeguarding our democratic processes. Finally, we touch on the evolving history of masculinity in American politics, the widening gender gap in American politics, providing insight into how these elements intersect and impact our political landscape. 

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Dr. Elias:

If you stop feeding the monster, if you stop engaging in pages that have troll-like political content, then this stuff will decline. I don't know if it will decline to the point where it doesn't become an issue, but it will decline. The problem is, as we kind of started this conversation and I'm with you I think gossip is fascinating and interesting.

Shawn:

I think gossip is fascinating and interesting and I want to click on the crazy article about the rumors about Barron Trump, for the saccharine stuff that's going to kind of rot our teeth in democracy at the same time. Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. Gossip, rumor, insinuation, lies have always been part of our American politics, but welcome to the Trump era where this type of misinformation and disinformation is supercharged and, frankly, dominates our political discourse. We are living through a time in which one man has pretty much single-handedly transformed one of our two political parties in the United States, the Republican Party, into a factory of bad information and untruths. The rise of Donald Trump and this brand of politics has underscored just how much rumors, innuendo, half-truths and total untruths can shape the political narrative, often overshadowing policies or substantive discussion, disagreement and problem-solving. During the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, when asked about immigration policy, trump gave no actual answer and instead pivoted to spread the lie that Haitians living legally in Springfield, ohio were eating residents' pets. When asked by a reporter at the National Association of Black Journalists convention why voters should trust him, given the divisive comments he's made about people of color, trump again avoided the substance of the question, pivoted and responded inexplicably by saying that he didn't know if Kamala Harris is Black and stating that she just recently became Black. In normal times, we could highlight one or two egregious comments like this made by a candidate, but in the Trump era, and with Trump and the Republican Party, these comments, these rumors, these lies, insinuations run literally into the thousands. This is particularly dangerous because this is a time when sensationalism dominates headlines and social media amplifies every whisper. So this type of misinformation and disinformation has become a political weapon, a force that distorts the truth and threatens the core principles of democracy.

Shawn:

In this episode, we're taking a look at how this culture of gossip and rumor and lies insinuation has taken on a life of its own in the Trump era, where speculation often stands in for fact and personal attacks are used to discredit opponents, and how it's been deployed to undermine trust in institutions, erode faith in democratic processes and blur the line between reality and fiction. To help me with this topic, my guest today is Dr Christopher Elias. He's an historian who researches and writes about culture, identity, gender and gossip in politics, and he's also the author of the book Gossipment, j Edgar Hoover, joe McCarthy, roy Cohn and the Politics of Insinuation, and he's here to help me unpack the role that gossip and insinuation have played in the political landscape of the Trump years, explore how these tools, while often seemingly trivial, have contributed to the rise of misinformation, confusion and vitriolic discourse in our politics today, and we discuss how these things aren't just side effects of a hyper-polarized era. They are central to a strategy that intends to dismantle trust in institutions and exploit uncertainty for political gain and chip away at American democracy.

Shawn:

All right, if you like this episode or any episode, please give it a like, share and follow on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn at gmailcom. Let's do a deep dive, dr Elias. Thanks for being here. How are you?

Dr. Elias:

Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk.

Shawn:

Yeah, me too. I wanted to have you here because we're, you know, right now, in this moment, staring down a third presidential election in the United States, with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, someone who is, I think, directly responsible for the injection into and normalization of a lot of the lies and innuendo and insinuation and vitriol in our contemporary political discourse. But he's not the first public or political figure in American history to behave this way, to weaponize this type of rhetoric and messaging. And this is something you know very well, You've researched, you've written about, most notably in your book Gossip Men J Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and the politics of insinuation. Hoover was, of course, the first director of the FBI and he served from what was it? 1924 until his? Yeah, 1924 until 72. Until 72, when he died. Yeah, yeah, he didn't go willingly, no, he did not.

Shawn:

And Joe McCarthy was a US senator from my home state, Wisconsin, who became famous, maybe infamous, in the early 50s for leading what would become known as McCarthyism. So it was a campaign to root out communists, or alleged communists anyway in the government and other institutions. And then Roy Cohn was a lawyer, chief counsel to McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings and then later an attorney in New York, notably Donald Trump's attorney, and so all three of these men were known for kind of using aggressive tactics. They bullied people, they used inflammatory rhetoric, intimidated folks, targeted people, and they often disregarded things like due process and civil liberties along the way.

Shawn:

So, in a way, these guys are like the godfathers of the politics we're experiencing today and, to my mind and after reading Gossip Men, you're the guy to talk to about this. So thanks for taking the time to dig into it with me. Yeah, this is great. Okay, so let's start with some basics, some building blocks, I think, for the rest of our conversation, and that is, and this might seem you know, 101, but you know, just to get it out of the way, can you define gossip, rumor, insinuation, how maybe they differ and why it matters to know the difference?

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, and actually I realize it's a building block, but I don't think it's 101, because I think there are complex ways in which these concepts run into each other and overlap and things like that. In a way, I think of rumor as an umbrella term that encapsulates things like gossip and insinuation, innuendo and slander and libel. But the fact of the matter is that rumor is really any unconfirmed information about anything, and so an example of rumor could be something as salacious as your neighbor is having an affair, or something as simple as they're going to put parking meters under block sometime next week for the first time ever. Insinuation is something that suggests, and that's what we see a lot of in public discourse around politics, due to worries about slander and libel and legal suits arising out of potentially false information. So a famous one in my world, j Edgar Hoover, who for many, many years was followed by rumors that he was homosexual, was described as having a mincing step in some early articles about him in 1933. It was also described as wearing lavender-colored socks and pocket squares, and again, this is an insinuation suggestion about his sexuality without saying it explicitly.

Dr. Elias:

Gossip to me, and what distinguishes gossip from rumor, is it's information about human subjects and it's designed to make an audience feel a certain way about that subject, and so I think one of the things about gossip that's so fascinating to me is that it plays this social role, and many times that social role is actually very conservative.

Dr. Elias:

An example of this would be new neighbors move across the street and you hear that they are in a polyamorous relationship.

Dr. Elias:

Right, that gossip is not only necessarily supposed to perhaps disparage them if you have, if it's your conservative church-going neighbor that told you about these new neighbors that moved in but it's also designed to get you to think a certain way about what kinds of people are moving into your community and the way that you, as the recipient of that gossip or the audience for that gossip, react to that gossip.

Dr. Elias:

Then will tell your neighbor who told you the gossip what you think about this, right, and so when you share gossip with somebody, you're not only sharing information, you're also doing it for the purpose of seeing how somebody reacts to that information, and so what the effect of that is is you create this in-group and out-group relationship where the reactions to the information tell you whether or not a person belongs to the same tribe as you or is a person that you may perhaps want to write out, and we can get into some of the nuances of this as we talk, but in general, that's the way I see gossip as differentiated from a rumor insinuation. The other thing I should say is gossip is always about a person and almost always has something about it that is a little bit salacious, something that you want to share about it that is a little bit salacious, something that you want to share.

Shawn:

So, leaving aside libel and slander, because those have a legal connotation and there's right exactly.

Shawn:

Yeah, there's like a there's a legal framework around harm caused there and kind of focusing more on gossip and rumor and insinuation, I mean full disclosure. I probably engage in this. Well, not probably I do. I mean, I'm not like I'm not saying that this is how I, this is how all my interactions are. But you know, I definitely can think of conversations in the very recent history where, you know, I'm gossiping with people not to cause harm and sometimes the top, the subject of it has there's no harmful component to it. Right To me it's like passing on information. At the same time, I'm aware in the moment and this is where I want to maybe there are no, you know, bright lines here that distinguish it, but you know, in the moment I'm not, I am very aware that I don't want to tip into, you know, a harmful conversation as opposed to just kind of. You know it's maybe it's a little salacious, but it's just kind of interesting Right now. You're in some ways signaling to me that you trust me with this information.

Dr. Elias:

Right, and so that's another part of the social function as well, and it creates social bonds.

Shawn:

So I guess my question then is and that's where we get at Maybe there are no bright lines, but when are these bad and can they be good? Are these bad and can they be good?

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, I mean, I think gossip so much can be good in a number of ways and kind of depends on which line you're in. There is such a thing as positive gossip, right, there is positive gossip about an individual. You think of JFK Jr who, after he passed away in a plane crash, despite what QAnon may tell you, jfk Jr was somebody who it came out about him that he had been donating anonymously thousands and thousands of dollars to local charities and things like that. Another classic example of this would be the really curmudgeonly guy that you have to deal with in the HR accounting department at your job is every year donating 10 grand to the St Jude Children's Hospital for Christmas. That's a piece of information about somebody that perhaps they would rather not have shared about them, but it is something that's positive.

Dr. Elias:

The other thing where gossip can be good is it can be good for, yes, drawing these social lines but also sharing essential information. You know there's anthropologist Susan Watkins down in Central Africa who did some great work on sexual gossip and AIDS in Malawi and the way in which young single people would gossip about who had had sexual relationships with other people in the community to try to determine who possibly was a carrier of the AIDS virus, and that's kind of essential information for life. So gossip as a purveyor of information can be both positive. It also can provide in many ways a social good. And I guess where the line is and as you say, s, there are no bright lines here, but I guess where the line is is you know, qui bono, who benefits right, who is benefiting from this information, and is the benefit that is created in the world by sharing that information outweigh the harm that is also done?

Shawn:

There's another. I don't know if I don't know if I picture this as a Venn diagram, but there's another space where I kind of want to draw some clarity, and that is, you know, the political realm and then the social realm. Yes, and I feel like I don't know. There's responsibility in both realms. That can be quite critical, right, but I feel like there's almost a higher bar. That can be quite critical, right, but I feel like there's almost a higher bar. That is, is expected or should be expected in the political realm when it comes to things like gossip and rumor and insinuation, but it's always been part of our politics, right? And so I'm wondering if you've ever given any thought to how these things function differently, or maybe the difference in impact or, um, the difference in weight as they're employed both in the political realm versus, I suppose, the social realm.

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, and I think that from one perspective, the difference really is a matter of scale. Right, there's still in-group and out-group creation when you're talking about political gossip. It still maybe shares essential information in certain ways, but these groups are much larger and the values are on full display. Politicians are public figures who are always being judged. It's kind of something that they sign up for increasingly in the 21st century. The 21st century, and so, though the content of gossip might be the same in social gossip, in political gossip the stakes are profoundly different, maybe not necessarily greater, because the stakes in your personal life of a piece of personal gossip can be incredibly large, but the stakes in political gossip have these larger reverberations.

Dr. Elias:

To return to an example I used earlier, a polyamorous couple moves across the street from you.

Dr. Elias:

Well, if that person who is polyamorous or is in an open relationship is suddenly your congresswoman or a senator, that person is now making personal decisions that you might believe impact their understanding of what some of the central tenets of American society are.

Dr. Elias:

Specifically, you know, since we think of American liberalism since World War II as so focused on building up the nuclear family, and something that's certainly in discussion right now with the emergence of JD Vance as the GOP's VP candidate, and there's evidence for this, there's history for this.

Dr. Elias:

Gary Hart in 1988 was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination when it came out that he was having an affair. Now Hart had an understanding with his wife at the time. They had an open relationship, but that really did not play with the American electorate. Hart is eventually forced to drop out and then Michael Dukakis gets slammed by George HW Bush in that election. But this idea that maybe you would even accept certain things in your friends that you wouldn't accept in a politician, particularly because that politician is not only a representative of themselves and their personal community, they're representative of their community as a whole. And so I think the reverberations are greater and I also think that the spotlight is certainly greater, and quite often we expect politicians to live more conservative, small C, conservative, staid lives than we would our friends and neighbors.

Shawn:

So I want to talk about. You know the form that this takes in the political world United States political world anyway today and you know we can refer to this as the Trump era, because I think just everyone kind of knows what you're talking about when you say the Trump era.

Shawn:

Yeah, absolutely I don't think it's limited to Trump, it does feel particularly vicious. But you know, we all live in a, you know, a finite period of time and this is where people like you come in. You can provide some context, right, historical context. It's easy to think it's super bad right now, right, that Trump has just injected our politics with something horrible. But then, you know, if we do you know, consider some of the subjects that you've studied, like Hoover and McCarthy and Cohen there were very real consequences to people's lives for what they were doing as well. I immediately think of, you know, Senator Hunt committed suicide over. You know, mccarthy's kind of blackmail of him, right, and so you know there are real consequences. So maybe this is a good time to talk about not only some of the things, some of the ways this manifested as driven by Hoover, mccarthy and Cohn, and then how that might be a vein to what we're seeing today.

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, I think that if you want to really zoom back, gossip has been part of American politics since before the founding, and anyone who's seen you know the play Hamilton can tell you about this, the way that it influenced the political prospects of Alexander Hamilton, specifically affairs that he had with Maria Reynolds. And there's been gossip about American politicians for years. And I could go through here. I teach a whole class that goes through the history of how gossip has influenced American politics, from things about Lincoln being African-American to affairs of presidents like James Garfield, all the way up. But I do think, as we look at the immediate progenitors of the Trump era, as I think you've accurately called it in American politics, part of the reason why I seized on this post-1945, post-world War II moment is because it is a moment where the modern media emerges. And now, certainly, the media of the McCarthy era the late 1940s and then into the early 1950s is a horse of a completely different color than the media of today. We can talk about that in a moment. What makes the media of today different? But at the same time, mccarthy was taking advantage of a media landscape that allowed him to speak more directly to the populace than he had before and spread gossip more directly to the populace than he ever had before. One example is in 1950, mccarthy wants to get rid of a Democratic senator from Maryland by the name of Lord Tidings. Tidings had led an inquiry into McCarthy in the Senate and McCarthy then makes it during the 1950 midterm elections, basically his mission to get rid of Tidings in favor of Republican candidate Gavin McFaul. Mission to get rid of tidings in favor of Republican candidate Gavin McFaul. And what McCarthy does is he sends, using help from newspaper people in Washington and Baltimore, he sends a tabloid mailer to thousands and thousands of voters in Maryland that includes a number of rumors and pieces of gossip about Miller Tidings particularly not necessarily salacious or sexual in that manner, but rather the idea that Tidings was in bed with Earl Browder proverbially in bed with Earl Browder, the leader of the Communist Party of the United States at the time, or actually had previously been the Communist Party of the United States leader and had recently retired. And so what McCarthy is doing is at a moment when gossip magazines are incredibly popular. They're even outselling a number of major magazines like Time Life and the Saturday Evening Post at newsstands in the early 1950s.

Dr. Elias:

Mccarthy is using this language and this vehicle of a one-off tabloid to speak directly to the American voting public, specifically the voting public of Maryland, in a way that is familiar to them.

Dr. Elias:

He's using this vernacular, he's using this argument that they are able to understand it, and I think there's a very short hop skip and a jump from there to the way that many politicians today, most notably Donald Trump, use social media Twitter now, truth Social and so I think there is this concept that when you have have politicians who are willing to push the edge of decency as far as lying, insinuation are concerned, things that should not be talked about in public, things that should be talked about in public, if they're willing to push that envelope, they're also going to be willing to push the envelope using the best available technology of the time, and McCarthy uses radio tabloids, as I mentioned and then his relationship with newspaper men because they were mostly men at that moment to try to plant stories about his rivals, at a time where newspapers, of course, have been around since the beginning of the United States, but newspapers had become a little bit more focused on entertainment, had become a little bit more focused on a willingness to print things that might be perceived as towing the line between news and gossip and were trying to really carve out a more entertaining corner in the populace, particularly because they, as a politician who is willing to use new technology to his benefit, and the things that he is saying in that new technology, are also pushing the envelope of what is proper public discourse.

Shawn:

So I'm glad you bring up social media because you know this is another avenue through which you you know these three guys didn't really have at the time to you know both disseminate but spread, uh, information. And there's something about social media, there's a at least a component, at least one component to it that makes me particularly anxious in its ramifications. That didn't exist, you, you know, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc. And that is it's not only a resource and a tool through which information can be disseminated, it's one. It can be disseminated very quickly and in a way that makes it hard to wrap your head around how you check that bad information, right.

Shawn:

But also, too, in the 50s and 60s and 70s, it was hard to measure the proliferation of information to some degree, right, you know, you could measure how many people were getting newspapers right, but you couldn't, it wasn't easy, to measure how people in their daily lives were disseminating that within their own groups, and so I think, to some degree it was a bit of a crapshoot. You could drop a bomb, you know, and by that I mean you know some, you know salacious detail about someone, right, and you could track. You know how it's being reported in the news via either TV or papers, but you didn't really know necessarily, it wasn't easy to track how it was spreading through communities, and that's different today. I think it's easy to see on social media how many people have viewed something, how many people have shared something Right, and that is anxiety inducing to me, because it seems like that is providing a new avenue through which people can measure what works and what doesn't work and then exploit that.

Dr. Elias:

You said a number of interesting things there. One that I'll zoom in on for a second is you know, gossip magazines have often had this problem. You assume that a newspaper or a mainline magazine, mainstream magazine is read by the subscriber, whoever buys it. But gossip magazines because they're things that are often passed along among friends, gossip magazines have often tried to track their readership by a pass-through rate, and so the numbers are really hard to get here. But sometime in the late 1980s, People magazine suggested that for every copy of the magazine they printed, actually 3.2 people read that magazine, and so this pass-through rate is something that Twitter and Truth, social and Threads and Instagram and TikTok and whoever else can very much track.

Dr. Elias:

And I think that goes back to what really makes this era unique from some previous eras that have had a lot of gossip influencing American politics. I mean number one, the modern media landscape. I mean number one, the modern media landscape. We talk about social media, but I really this began, I think, with cable television in the mid 1980s. Cable TV allowed people to silo themselves into their own little corners of the world and only get the information that most confirmed their view of the world. It's confirmation bias on steroids, and so, in the way that today I can open up my laptop and only get information on the internet from, for example, right-leaning websites if I want to go to Red State Town Hall, whatever it is right, cable television allowed that to a degree, and so my worldview, now that I can get this information first of cable television, now on the Internet I can get information I can, I can feed myself a diet of information that only confirms what I know, makes it much less possible for me to empathize with other forms of political discourse.

Dr. Elias:

The other thing here is social media allows politicians to speak directly to constituents. Right, you know, regardless of whether or not you were publishing in a Republican or Democratic or independent newspaper, in the 1950s there was still an editorial function. Right, there's still somebody. Even if I am a politician who has a writer on my side, there is still an editor who, to some degree, is maybe going to cut out some of the most ridiculous claims.

Dr. Elias:

Right, that doesn't exist on Twitter or Truth Social, I can post whatever the heck I want, and its readability, its popularity, is the thing that allows for its dissemination, rather than necessarily someone saying, oh, this is actually a good take on the thing, and then, because of that direct relationship between politicians and individuals, a number of voters have developed this kind of parasocial relationship with politicians. Trump is the most extreme and obvious version of this, but I'd say that it happens on the left a little bit, with people like AOC, that there is this belief that this person because they're speaking directly to you and you can reply to what they have said to you on Twitter they are really representing your rights, your desires, and they're on a crusade for you. And this is what kind of turns, or helps turn, the Republican Party into the party of Trump, a party that serves exclusively the desires of one man, desires of one man partially because the cult of personality of him is so strong, because his followers have this parasocial relationship with him as facilitated by social media.

Shawn:

I want to follow this thread about the cult of personality because, specific to Trump, and I guess this is also circling back a little bit to this era, feeling, you know, circling back a little bit to this era, feeling, you know, particularly vicious and by extension, I suppose to me also feels a bit more dangerous than perhaps prior eras. And I think the closest of the three guys that you've written about in Gossip Men, the one that I would probably and you can disagree with me on this that I would probably associate the closest with Trump, would be McCarthy, on solely the fact that he did actually have a kind of fervent base that I don't think that Hoover and Cohn did. But that could just be my own lack of knowledge, right. But at the same time there were still a lot of checks on McCarthy. We kind of don't know he died young, ish, right. We don't know how that would have all played out.

Shawn:

But you know, trump has something that these guys didn't have and that is a huge base. He has acquiescence of the party and he I think you can disagree, I think he goes much further than these three guys did Hoover, McCarthy and Cohen in his use and leverage of gossip and rumor and insinuation and to me that seems like it poses a real threat to democracy in a way that these three guys maybe didn't, and I guess I'm just trying. I want to pick your brain on that and how you think about that.

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, and I think that you know the fact that Trump I agree with you that Trump has, with the exception of Hoover Trump certainly has more power than McCarthy or Cohn ever had. I don't think that is a byproduct of McCarthy and Cohn limiting themselves in any or editing themselves in any way. If they had the opportunity, they would have pushed further. But for various reasons, mccarthy is limited by the Republican Party by the time that he enters the White House in 1953,. Dwight Eisenhower is working behind the scenes to try to limit McCarthy's influence because he sees him as disruptive and not a good way. Right, roy Cohn is not a politician, he's a lawyer. He doesn't have a base. You know Hoover does have a base, even though he wasn't a politician. There are these people you know very much.

Dr. Elias:

In Beverly Gage's new biography of Jerry Hoover, g-man, beverly Gage's new biography of JR Cooper, g-man, you can see him as this populist figure who is fighting for the rights of people, whether it is in things in the white slave trade or fighting communism, whatever it is. But the fact of the matter is Trump doesn't have those guardrails. He should have had the guardrails provided to him by party politics and we saw those guardrails in effect working with the Democratic Party, with the acquiescence of Joe Biden about a month ago, when he stepped down Right, we saw a party coming together and saying this is not what we want. This is kind of beyond what we imagined. Now, for obvious different reasons, then, trump has moved, quote unquote, beyond the pale, but we see a party working. The Republican Party has thrown itself over to Donald Trump, and thus those guardrails don't exist.

Dr. Elias:

Another guardrail that Trump does not have, by and large, is a media guardrail, despite kind of the attempts of both left-leaning and mainstream news organizations to hold themselves in knots on what verbiage to use in talking about Trump's untruths. Do we say misleading? Do we say untruth? Do we say lying? And he is just playing a completely different game at that point.

Dr. Elias:

Right, and so the fact of the matter is that because Trump doesn't have these guardrails, he is able to do things that, specifically, mccarthy and Cohn could never dream of, and whether that is reshape the United States through by appointing three people to Supreme Court, to reshaping what political discourse is there's? This imaginary in some ways, that the United States is going to go back to a pre-Trumpian, maybe even pre-Tea Party politics once Trump has left the political scene, but I think that in many ways it's a fantasy, in the sense that the genie is out of the bottle and Trump has shown that you can say some of the most extreme things known to any kind of discourse, political discourse. You can say the most extreme things in the world and not be thrown apart or thrown aside by either your political party or your base, because you are delivering certain things that these people want, whether that is policy wins, whether that is Supreme Court and federal justice appointments, or that is a sense of fighting back against the liberals and the institutions that you believe have made your life hard.

Shawn:

So I'm glad that you you know you directly confronted this idea that you know, in the absence of Trump, somehow temperatures cool, because I think we're on the same page. I absolutely disagree with that for a number of reasons, but I kind of want to build to this, so so go with me here. Yeah, absolutely. Hoover, mccarthy and Cohn and the tactics that they employed you know, utilizing and exploiting gossip and rumor and insinuation were a threat to democracy. And if so, if you also think that Donald Trump and I suppose his acolytes, using the same tactics, are a threat to democracy?

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, and I think I'll put a little bit of limit on this J Edgar Hoover did things as leader of the FBI that are undoubtedly a threat to democracy, whether it's COINTELPRO, whether it's trying to manipulate the civil rights movement, whether it is kind of suspending certain legal guardrails. So the question of whether or not these guys engage in policies that were a threat to American democracy, I think there's no debate about that. The interesting question is does their use of gossip and insinuation become a threat to democracy? And I think the answer is yes?

Dr. Elias:

I think the answer is yes, absolutely, in the sense that they're not playing on a level playing field, and there has to be. I think when, any time, you have a government that is supposed to capture the voice of the people, as a republic does, you need to have people who are playing the game earnestly and saying what they want, and I think that all politicians lie, manipulate. The most famous example that I use in my class of this is Barack Obama's pivot on the question of gay marriage when he's running for president. At the same time, if you go back to McCarthy, hoover and Cohn, take Cohn, for example and this comes out of the time that Donald Trump and his father, fred, are sued by the United States Housing Authority the Federal Housing Authority for engaging in discriminatory practices they settle right. What ends up happening is they settle with the federal government to try to get the monkey off their back and Cohn then comes out, approaches the proverbial microphone and says we're so happy that the federal government capitulated. That wasn't true at all. He's lying, right, and it's this use of lying and the fact that nobody checked him that really made him so dangerous, right?

Dr. Elias:

What I'm talking about in earnestness of communication, earnestness of purpose. Is this idea that you can't have a robust public discourse about the merits of a policy right if you only have people who are trying to manipulate the system to gain the system to their own ends right, whatever those ends may be. And so when you have McCarthy doing this by lying about the types of information he has, it's not only that he is saying. You know, that's the fact that somebody joined a young socialist club when they were in college is a problem related to loyalty to the United States, he said he's lying about the relationship that people had to those political organizations. If you want to have a conversation about whether or not somebody deserves a censure because they belonged to a certain left-wing or, for the sake of discussion, right-wing political organization when they were 19 years old, that's an interesting discussion to have. But you can't have that discussion if you're manipulating the public's perception of what those organizations were dedicated to doing. And I think that manipulation of what does it mean to be a socialist, for example, is something that Joe McCarthy was doing. It's something that JD Vance is doing right now and the Trump campaign is doing right now as far as what it means to be a socialist in American politics.

Dr. Elias:

The second part of your question was related to Trump and the ways in which whether or not they're engaged in using gossip in the same way that McCarthy and Comer I think they certainly are. I think it moves beyond misleading and manipulating into outright lying about the backgrounds of individuals and what they're trying to do. And the idea that the president of the United States has a responsibility, or somebody who has served as president of the United States has a responsibility to at least adhere to something that looks like the truth when you squint a little bit. I think is essential to the operation of democracy and the fact that the greatest example of this, of course, is the big lie in the 2020 election. The election was manipulated. The fact that you don't have somebody willing to do that is fundamentally the threat to democracy.

Shawn:

And so, before I kind of wrap up where I was going with this in response to what you're saying, I think it's a good time and I don't want to put too fine of a point on this that the work that you do and I guess we're talking a lot about gossip man but this work, as it relates to gossip and insinuation and rumor in our politics, I think it gets a little bit of short shrift. When we talk about threats to democracy, I think we often talk about tangible, exogenous and endogenous threats. So things like, you know, bypassing Senate for confirmation and instead just putting in, you know, temporary directors you know that's a that's a tangible threat to democracy. Or nullifying Supreme Court decisions, etc. Right, right, gerrymandering.

Shawn:

But I don't think what we talk enough about is how these less tangible things like gossip and insinuation are actually equally threats to democracy. And I think one area that does get attention is something that you mentioned, which is the big lie, right, and I think that is something that is easy for us to identify as being how gossip and insinuation can be a threat to democracy. But there are a lot of other ways that you know tactics that were employed by these three guys Hoover, mccarthy, cohn and then now a lot of figures in politics, where I'm talking primarily about Trump and, I suppose, by extension, Vance, but the same things that they're engaged in that are less tangible but are real threats to democracy.

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, and I mean I think that the other, you know maybe this is up there with the big lie, but the distrust of academic and kind of technocratic authority that you're talking about, about kind of these literal reshapings of the United States government to make it a less democratic and small d democratic institution are troubling.

Dr. Elias:

But the most insidious thing that Trump and his allies have done has made America question the legitimacy of democracy, and they are not alone in that.

Dr. Elias:

They have been helped by the Vietnam War and Watergate and Bill Clinton lying about his sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Dr. Elias:

There is certainly a laundry list of things that the United States government has done over the past two or three generations that have, can and should make people very dubious about the workings of a large bureaucratic institution like that. At the same time, there needs to be this bedrock faith that the institutions are going to have the people's best interest in mind, and that's why I think what Brad Raffensperger did down in Georgia is so important and what other people have done, trying to put institution and country quite frankly before political interest. But just to kind of draw a line in this. The problem here is what this discourse does, I would argue on both left and right is. It profoundly promotes distrust in the form of conspiracy theory, in the form of whatever you want to call it, but it profoundly promotes distrust among the populace and makes them less engaged in democratic, small d democratic politics, which is what a democracy needs to thrive. I'll be very, very interested to see what happens in the next generation over metrics such as voting percentage and political participation in that way.

Shawn:

Well, this actually does kind of bring me back to you know originally, why I started asking this line of questioning related to threats to democracies because you had mentioned that this idea or this kind of false security blanket that people wrap themselves in, which is that you know, once Trump's off the scene, temperature's cool, and that that's not the case. I agree with you. I don't believe that's the case. I don't think history tells us that's the case, right, right.

Shawn:

So if we think of this as an evolution and I don't want to catastrophize and I don't want to sound hysterical, but I mean if we think of these things in the context of being threats to democracy, you know politicians of all stripes, but you know particularly the Republican Party, has learned that there is some purchase here in doubling down on some of the worst aspects of political gossip, rumor and insinuation. Right, it only seems to be getting more vitriolic. I don't see that going away. And then couple that with we are not going to technologically crumble, right, like we're just going to continue to advance. There are going to be more ways for people to connect and spread information faster, with less checks over time. So if we take those two things together, it does worry me about what the next iteration of this looks like, and I wonder if you've given any thought to that.

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, and again, I'm with you in the idea that I don't want to catastrophize, but when you think of things that have started to influence elections in the United States and around the world whether it's Russian troll slash bot farms, whether it is AI being used to manipulate what people think they see, it is incredibly dangerous and, quite frankly, it's too. Most of these things that I'm thinking about here are technologically inclined, and it's too. It's too important to leave to Silicon Valley. It's too important to leave to Elon Musk or even Jack Dorsey. Right, I think it's something where there are a handful of people in the United States Senate that have been trying to step up, but the problem with that is it becomes the shell game. It becomes the government, quite frankly, is not agile enough to prevent the next thing that's coming around the pike.

Dr. Elias:

And I what I have been a little bit heartened by is, I think, in many ways, people are starting to become a lot more mindful about how they use technology, what they interact with, who they interact with, heck what kind of articles they click on, right, uh, and partially because of the things that you were talking about earlier, of the ability to track what people want and if you stop feeding the monster, if you stop engaging in pages that have troll-like political content, then this stuff will decline. I don't know if it will decline to the point where it doesn't become an issue, but it will decline. I don't know if it will decline to the point where it doesn't become an issue, but it will decline. The problem is, we kind of started this conversation and I'm with you.

Dr. Elias:

I think gossip is fascinating and interesting and I want to click on the crazy article about the rumors about Barron Trump or even if I know it's fake the stuff about JD Vance on the couch. It's entertaining, trump. Or, you know, even if I know it's fake the stuff about JD Vance on the couch, right, so it's entertaining. And so we're fighting against human nature and in some ways, all of us have a responsibility to proverbially eat our vegetables and not only go for the saccharine stuff that's going to kind of rot our teeth in democracy at the same time.

Shawn:

So a lot of attention that is being paid on what seems to be a political realignment in the United States and our contemporary politics focuses on racial divides in our politics and class divides. And I think what maybe does get equal attention and should get equal attention, if not more is that it does seem like we're also going through a very stark gender divide in our politics and I think that's deliberate, particularly on the part of the Republican Party, and that's because there is this vein of some type of masculinity that is injected into the way that they talk and the gossip and the rumors and the insinuation that they disseminate. And this also correlates to some of the work that you've done. And you talk about this in Gossip Men and how it influenced Hoover, McCarthy and Cohn, and I think there's always like a sexual kind of component to this. Yes, For all three of these guys there were rumors about their sexuality, I think Cohn and Hoover there's a little bit more evidence.

Shawn:

They're there, yeah, but for McCarthy not so much, but nonetheless there's this masculine kind of component to it which I find somewhat fascinating. And you spend a little bit of time talking about what this looks like and how Christianity kind of influenced that. So could you tell me a little bit about that history and how that then influenced these guys and has translated to our political discourse?

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, the older kind of history of masculinity, the way that the history of masculinity in the United States used to be told, is that there are these sharp moments of crisis in American history where, all of a sudden, for 10, 15, 20 years, people are really anxious about masculinity and whether men are men anymore. And the old story about this is one that happens in the late 19th century, around the turn of the 20th century, related to industrialization. It's one that happens after World War II and then maybe there's one that happens during the 1990s. And the new history of it is the fact of the matter that masculinity is always in crisis because you're always having young men that are being raised, you always have young men that are going through the stages of life and pretty uncertain about where they belong in the world. So, yes, it's always in crisis, but I do think there are to kind of reclaim a little bit of this old form of crisis and masculinity. I think there are some moments where it bubbles to the top as a point of national discourse, and we're in one right now. To go back to the religious aspect of it, one of the things that happens in the late 19th and early 20th century is a movement called Muscular Christianity, which is an attempt to try to kind of give steroids to Jesus for lack of a better term and amplify the more hard-driven, vigorous elements of Christianity and tone down perhaps the stuff about forgiveness, loving thy neighbor, etc. This is a direct reaction to the fact that men feel threatened in the workplace because you have two things that happen. Because you have two things that happen. Number one the de-skilling of labor and the growth of industrialization and things like mechanization in the assembly line make men feel like they are replaceable cogs. They're no longer artisans making a chair, they're just a guy in the assembly line putting a rod into one of the chairs to pass it along to the next person, to put the next rod in for the seat right, and so that's one thing that happens. The other thing that happens is because of de-skilling, the slavery you see, beginning with the law system in the mid-1800s and moving through, a lot more women in the workplace right, and so this becomes a co-ed space to some degree, and then men feel threatened by having to in many ways compete with women for jobs, even if it is a relatively small slice of the pie they're competing with. So, as a result to get men to feel a little bit more like men.

Dr. Elias:

There is this effort within Christian communities to train boys to be more masculine or, as we would think today, traditionally masculine. The YMCA which began in Britain is a direct outgrowth of this, using physicality as a way to glorify God and showing that your body is, if not a temple, then a church. And so this is a really interesting moment where Christian morality and male prerogative come into conversation and, of course, the history becomes fascinating because it becomes enmeshed with things like anti-immigration and eugenic thinking. This same confluence of Christian morality, christian dignity and what it means to be a Christian coming into conversation with conservative gender politics is also happening now, and I think you know we see it most clearly in the person of JD Vance. But there is both with Vance and Trump, in different ways, this attempt to reclaim masculine prerogative, and in Vance you have this a little bit more in the sense of, even though his family does not follow along with this structure. This is more of kind of trying to build on a trad wife, almost, you know, kind of flirting with the quiverful movement of have lots of children, raise children in the right way, in the Christian way, so that they're populating the world with good people.

Dr. Elias:

Now, of course, there's an implicit, both political, gendered, sexualized and definitely racialized component to what aren't good people. Why does JD Vance need to have so many kids? Right, there's that element that is going on. Interestingly enough, trump is another version of masculinity that grows out of this kind of unapologetic machismo and, I would argue, unapologetic male chauvinism. And this idea that the way to make men feel more like men, at a moment when what 54% of college degrees are earned by women in the United States, it might be up to 57 now, at a moment when women's representation in boardrooms and classrooms and the Senate is on the rise in the world, right, and this idea that men have feel like, particularly in a post Me Too era, this lie that men feel like they have to be apologetic for being men, is all kind of coming together in this moment of the Republican Party trying to reclaim it, and I think it's also really fascinating the way in which Kamala Harris and her campaign are reacting to it.

Dr. Elias:

Right, kamala Harris's campaign slogan is not I'm with her. Right, hillary Clinton was very much interested in amplifying, if not her femininity, then the fact that she was going to be the first female president. Kamala Harris, you know, when she just gave that interview with CNN last night, is not interested in talking about I'm going to defer self Asian or female president, or African-American female president. She's interested in thinking of herself as, or presenting herself, I should say as, somebody who should be president, not because of her identity politics, but rather because of her politics, and that's a really interesting change from the way that Hillary Clinton was presented to the American people. And so it seems like the Democrats, if not agreeing with any of this kind of reclamation of traditional gender roles stuff that has happened, particularly on the right side of American political culture, they are at least hearing that the post-MeToo kind of identity politics on which Hillary Clinton ran is perhaps a less winning strategy than what Harris is trying to do right now.

Shawn:

I find the concept of masculinity really interesting for a number of reasons. But you know, there's masculinity as an image. There's there's masculinity as an image and then there's masculinity as a performance. So there's how you look and then how you are or what you do. Right, and I feel like what's happening on the Republican side, and particularly with Trump and Vance, is it's kind of talking the talk.

Shawn:

And I feel like what's happening on the Democratic side and on the Harris ticket, harris-walls ticket, is that they're also leaning into masculinity in a much more muted way, but it's much more about Walls, as his form of masculinity is vulnerable, but it is also taking care of people and loving people, etc. And less about the projection of the image. And the reason I mention this is because it's interesting to me that the Republican Party is leaning so much and Vance is a purveyor of this. They're trafficking in the threat that queer families or childless women pose to families and the future of the United States, whereas I take the opposite argument that if we build a country and you know our democracy focuses primarily on policies that bend towards this what I consider a hollow man right Like that's actually more of a threat to the future of the country than is this other form of masculinity. Is this in any way resonating with you?

Dr. Elias:

Yeah, and I think it's really instructive that I believe in that original Childless Cat ladies quote that JD Vance muttered on that podcast. One of the examples he gives the Childless Cat is Pete Buttigieg, and so it's not only a fear of femininity or women in power, uh, it's also a fear of what republicans, or a lot of them, right-wing americans, would call quote-unquote, non-normative family structures. Right, and this idea that I don't think you can get in many ways more normative than pete, and christian buddhism right in this, in the way that you have monogamy, two kids. Pete Buttigieg is a pretty. In some ways it sounds weird to say he's a pretty conservative figure in the way that he leads his life. He's certainly not a social radical, but it seems to be that the Republicans, maybe perhaps because of their way of seeing the world, are playing this as a zero-sum game wherein there is a more.

Dr. Elias:

The Wallsian version of masculinity, the Tim Walls version of masculinity, is one in which you don't fight for a bigger slice of the pie, you're trying to make the pie bigger. You know to use, to use a metaphor that was used during the new deal, and so it's a different approach and it's a less competitive approach, and so, but at the same time, tim Walls is not. Tim Walls is trying to amplify his bona fides as a hunter, as somebody who you know. When he's at the Minnesota State Fair with his daughter and she tells him she can't have a corndog, she's a vegetarian, he says, okay, we'll have turkey playing into this more. Quote unquote traditional understanding of masculinity and this kind of middle American understanding, or what the popular culture perceives to be a middle American understanding of masculinity and, quite frankly, I think that's part of the reason why he got the nod over some of his competitors in the VP sweepstakes.

Shawn:

Okay, we can. We can begin to land the plane here. Yeah, whatever you want. So we in the green room, we talked a little bit about the origins of your research in this area and it kind of predates the 2016 election. You know, in some way that could have been a very interesting artifact of our politics. Right, the research. And then you know the golden escalator and happened and right Like that, that kind of gives a whole new dimension to the work. That, and urgency, I think, to the work that you're doing. So I guess I'm wondering I mean, there's a, there's a crass way to approach this, but like, and that is you know, how do you plan to capitalize on that? What do you do? You got in the works now.

Dr. Elias:

Oh man, I don't know if I'm interested necessarily in capitalizing on the decline of American politics anymore, but what's what's most interesting to me is story, and so the project that I'm working on.

Dr. Elias:

well, what originally got me interested in this story about Hoover, McCarthy and Cohen is the grand irony, as you alluded to earlier.

Dr. Elias:

All three of these men are deeply engaged in homophobic politics and all three of these men are to some degree, I would argue queer in the way that we use the word in contemporary american discourse.

Dr. Elias:

Right cone was certainly gay, jay agarhoover had if he was asexual or homosexual, I I am not sure, but he certainly was not what we would consider straight in 1930s, 40s or 50s terms. And even Joe McCarthy, there are a series of rumors surrounding his sexuality which he never fully almost came to terms with. And so to me, the story began as one of this great irony three men who used homophobia to help them rise in the ranks of American politics, who themselves were hiding something about their own sexuality and were eventually brought down to varying degrees because of the publicity surrounding rumors of their sexuality or gossip about their sexual uncertainty or their sexual non-normalness non-normativity, if you want to put it that way. I'll also begin with a really great story about a young man who's a son of Lebanese immigrants coming to Colorado in the early 20th century and getting wrapped up in a murder case and what I try to look for is these really the history of capital punishment and things like that relationship between labor and management in the American West?

Dr. Elias:

And so yes, story is the most important thing to me and I just hope I'm able to continue telling good ones. Okay, that sounds fascinating. You should circle back in the future. We definitely will. Okay, final question you ready for it to me, and I just hope I'm able to continue telling good ones.

Shawn:

Okay, that sounds fascinating. Uh, you should uh circle back in the future. We definitely talk about it um, okay, final question you ready for it? Let's do it. What's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately? It doesn't have to be related to this topic, but, uh, it can be oh man, uh, well, there's.

Dr. Elias:

There's a bunch of different things.

Dr. Elias:

The thing that's most related to this topic is Jessalyn Cook's new book called the Quiet Damage, which is reportage tracing how the QAnon conspiracy theory impacted five American families around the time of the 2016 election and into the 2020 election, and COVID, and that is obviously very related to some of the things that we're talking about in bringing political gossip into the American home.

Dr. Elias:

Another thing we talked about a little bit, s, was gossip is something that is about community building, and I usually read a really great novella by Claire Keegan called Small Things Like these that takes place in an Irish village in the mid-1980s and the impact of kind of the presence of a Catholic abbey there and what ends up being a home for wayward women, in the way that the secrets that are kept there are guarded by this community. 2017 film called Wajib that's directed by Anne-Marie Jassir, takes place in Nazareth in Palestine, tells a story of a father and a son who are going around to their neighbors and hand-delivering invitation to their daughter's slash sister's wedding, and it's just a great way of thinking about how community ties are made, why they're important, and then how familial ties relate to communal ties and the responsibility we owe our family members and the other members of our community.

Shawn:

So a lot of stuff about community right now. Thank you. I love when people give me some interesting stuff to read and watch. I have very long lists. Yeah, I know I'll very long lists, so yeah someday. Dr Elias, thanks for taking the time, not only for doing, I think, what is really crucial work here, but for talking to me about it.

Dr. Elias:

Thank you so much for having me. This is a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it, Shawn.

Shawn:

This conversation today is a reminder that lies, innuendo, gossip, rumor aren't new to American politics, but they have been weaponized in the Trump era to a degree that has completely distorted our sense of truth and reality, and this has dangerous implications for our democracy. What may seem like harmless rumor-mongering or casual innuendo has the power to dismantle trust in institutions, deepen divisions within society and generate a political landscape in which violent rhetoric and violence itself can take shape. And as long as this type of misinformation and disinformation continues to blur the lines between fact and fiction in our politics, we truly risk a future where these things become the defining features of our political landscape, and democracy needs some reference point of truth that we can all agree on in order to survive. We have to all agree that peaceful transfers of power are valuable and necessary, because if we don't, then January 6th happens again and again until the coup is successful. We have to agree that facts are facts, because if not, then we don't have to challenge our own beliefs, and if we don't have to do that, then conspiracy theories proliferate, dehumanization of our opponents can become commonplace, and in that space, horrible things can happen, have happened, and the situation is not that we are in danger of this happening at some point.

Shawn:

Here in the United States, we are already far down that road. The fact that another January 6th could happen is not a possibility sometime in the future. It's quite likely to happen in some form again this January 6th 2025, when Congress is set to certify the 2024 election. It doesn't have to be this way, but the last bulwark against the collapse of American democracy as a result of the damaging political rhetoric of our age is you, is us. We can choose to deny politicians and bad actors that traffic in lies and smears access to our political system and the subsequent levers of power. We can cast our votes only for candidates that have proven their commitment to facts and truths and, by extension, democracy. All right, check back next Sunday for another episode of Deep Dive Chat. Soon, folks. Thank you, thank you.

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Shawn C. Fettig

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