The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
@TenuredRadical
J.D. Vance

If You Want Families To Thrive, The Political Truth Is Inescapable

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s puerile remarks about “childless cat ladies” did have one positive effect, aside from the entertaining political cat memes that have colonized the internet. He pushed me to think about the causes, and consequences of the falling birthrate, not just in the United States, but around the globe.

When I was in my 20s, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was at the height of his popularity: his work featured angry, frustrated women, often dating, or married to someone named “Brad” who was oblivious to their pain and frustration. As we young women, gay and straight, powered our way through graduate school, Lichtenstein T-shirts circulated. One featured a woman waking up from a nap, thinking: “Oh my God! I left the baby on the bus!” Another shows a woman clutching her forehead in frustration: “I can’t believe it,” she says. “I forgot to have children.”

This is funny because no one forgets to have children: you either can’t, which can be a heartache to those who want them; or you decide not to, and you retain a measure of life’s freedoms for yourself.

My own decision to not have children, or partner with someone who did, was an almost direct consequence of homophobia. I was born in 1958: during my peak, and even late, childbearing years, queer family formation was a largely invented thing. As we know, same-sex marriage was not federally protected until 2015, and second parent adoption did not begin to become legal until 1993 (and still is not legal, or straightforward, in all 50 states.) By the late 1990s, when lesbians could be sure in states like New York that their own and their partners’ custody rights were secure, I was well past the age when I could easily conceive or carry a child to term.

But I also did not particularly want to have a child, and in the 1980s, I entered a relationship with someone who felt the same. And as the first generation to come to maturity after second-wave feminism, my cohort of women—armed with legal abortion, plentiful birth control, and the right to go to graduate and professional schools, some of us just said no. Others said “Maybe,” a position that could become an effective no if the question was to be reconsidered after tenure, making partner, or finishing up a prestigious medical residency. Some of them slid under the wire and had a baby or two at what used to be considered an advanced age; others tried and failed.

I wouldn’t describe any of these people as miserable: we have all had, regardless of whether the choice to not bear and raise children was conscious or not, wonderful careers, partners, lives, and happiness in the same measure as those who did.

But was the choice “selfish,” as Republicans would, have it? In some part, of course it was. When any person decides not to procreate, it is an act of putting the self before the collective—whether that collective is family, society, or the nation. At the level of the individual, that choice is not invidious; in fact, some climate activists (one extreme is the Voluntary Human Extinction movement) view not reproducing as a form of planetary repair.

And here’s the news: having just retired at the reasonable age of 65, what made it possible was not having children. That’s right. I did a rough calculation the other day, and it probably saved me around $300,000, most of which went into my 401(k) to earn compound interest.

Did I miss something? Sure—but I not only had lots of young people in my life in my role as a college professor, but I have also had the pleasure of helping the children of friends and relatives find themselves. I am willing to stipulate that parenthood is unique, transformative, and special (on a certain level, I fervently hope it is), and that parenting is some people’s greatest joy.

But Sen. Vance (R-OH) is simply wrong that the childless are miserable, or in denial about being miserable. As sociologist Jennifer Glass and her colleagues wrote in 2018, using data gathered in 22 countries, with a few exceptions (Norway and Hungary), parents are less happy than non-parents. Those who did have children intentionally had fewer: “The decrease in family size among those having children suggests that the early experiences of parenthood in many countries convince parents that their social, economic and emotional well-being is improved by reducing their fertility intentions,” the Glass study hypothesizes.

And parents in the United States are the unhappiest of all. By ignoring this, Vance and the Republican Party are unable to either define or solve the problem of falling birthrates they claim to care so much about.

As I said, I was born in 1958, a year when the birth rate in the United States was higher than it had been since before the Great Depression: 3.5 live births per woman. However, for the next 20 years, the baby boom turned to baby bust, halving that number by 1978. While American childbearing rose slightly between 1980 and 2000, it then dipped again, settling in at 1.8, where the U.N. projects that it will stay, not just in the United States, but globally.

There are lots of reasons for this decline in the United States, some of which I noted above. But you didn’t have to be a radical feminist to want birth control: prior to 1960, while some people had large families for religious reasons (in my neighborhood, there was a Catholic family of 12), many couples had more children than they wanted to have sex and lacked reliable conception. Then, in 1960, the birth control pill became widely available to those who could afford it. Unmarried women and married couples gained even more control over reproduction through the constitutional right to birth control (1965) and abortion (1973). Barriers fell to women’s participation in the workplace, and while some fathers became equal participants on the domestic front, most didn't.

Today, despite the fact that Republicans are systematically attacking both the right to abortion and birth control and the right to assisted reproduction, large majorities of Americans (including Republicans) believe they should have the right to determine their own reproductive futures. And except for the poor, who lack access to both contraception and now, to abortion, the birth rate has remained low because Americans exercise that right. According to Pew Research, a growing number of American adults between the ages of 18 and 50 simply prefer not to have children: that’s 60% of women, and 50% of men.

The question is: why? And this is where politics matters. The Republican party chooses to believe it is a cultural problem: feminists are selfish, gays can’t make babies on their own, “transgender ideology” is turning boys into girls without uteruses and girls into boys without sperm, and masculinity is under attack by the libs.

Democrats, on the other hand, want to do concrete things that address the problems Americans say they have.

OK, not all conservatives.

If you want to read the conservative thinking person’s argument for why Americans should have babies, and why they don’t, travel on over to my friend Ryan Girdusky’s Substack and read his most recent post, which is a gentle rebuke from inside the house to Vance’s “miserable cat ladies” screed. Ryan and I have very different political philosophies, but one of many things I like about him (other than that he is kind) is that he spends a lot of time talking to young conservatives and thinking about what they say.

In this post, Ryan says all the things that Vance could have—and should have—said, an apology of sorts that Vance might have made without ever straying off the Republican reservation. As Ryan writes, women in his own circles “who have had miscarriages, medical issues, or wanted children but were never in the right relationship at the right time to make a family have said they were upset about the clip they saw, not realizing the Ohio Senator was not referring to them.” Other women Ryan talked to explained that they “just never wanted children,” and “also felt targeted by his comment that their lives were miserable.”

As Ryan notes, the uproar over Vance’s two-year-old appearance on Tucker Carlson

is an important learning lesson for the right and the conversation that conservatives should be having with women.
The individual choice of whether or not someone has a family is deeply personal. If someone says it’s not for them, it doesn’t mean their life isn’t valuable or worthy. Having children is not the only meaningful factor in a woman’s life. Thankfully, we live in a society and time where women are afforded options for who they want to be and where they want to take their life.

That said, Ryan also believes that we should all be concerned about the material consequences of population decline. While he is a cultural nationalist who decries immigration, he is also a policy wonk, and believes that falling birthrates trigger material problems: among them are greater global competition for workers, and how a larger, aging population will be cared for by fewer younger workers (currently a significant problem in Japan.)

But this isn’t just a conversation on the right, but one that Democrats understand as linked to the national social safety net and the larger economy. In the United States, the debate over the future of Social Security and Medicare is linked to demography, since these programs do not actually return money we paid into a so-called “lockbox.” Instead, those dollars come from taxes paid by millions of active workers, who will in turn be supported by the taxes of even younger workers.

Now, the United States is not in population decline—yet: births have flatlined. By 2021, the nation was effectively at zero percent population growth, something that briefly ticked up from .1 to .4 percent growth post-pandemic (according to the National Immigration Forum, 81 percent of that .3 growth was due to global migration.) But lower birthrates mean that the portion of the population over 65 is disproportionate. Currently at 18 percent, according to Pew Research, older Americans will constitute almost a quarter of the population in 2053.

This, of course, has led JD Vance to insist, as he did in 2021, that “we have to go to war” against people who say it’s ok for women not to have children. That’s stupid. But the economic argument for making it possible for people to have the children they wish to raise is not unimportant, because the United States needs to replace, if not grow, its workforce in the coming decades. Yet, what Republicans do, instead of making that argument, is say it is a cultural problem with cultural solutions which can be achieved by coercion: eliminating abortion, restricting birth control, and social shaming (e.g., “childless cat ladies.”)

Republicans have also created a theory of gender that privileges men in two ways. First, it draws on complementarity (a long-standing conservative principle in which women do not require equality with men because they are different from them) to frame even highly accomplished women as wives and mothers first. More troublingly, they position the decline in marriage and childbearing as a failure of male leadership—for which MAGA hypermasculinity is the solution.

But what we know is that many people who would like to have children, or more children, and would also like to educate those children, pursue professional self-fulfillment, retire comfortably, buy a house, and not worry about money all the time, are under tremendous pressure to choose one or the other. We know, for example, that achieving economic well-being and being overwhelmed with caretaking that they cannot afford to outsource, are the primary reasons why women choose abortion. “Most abortion patients say that they cannot afford a child or another child, and most say that having a baby would interfere with their work, school or ability to care for their other children,” according to the Guttmacher Institute; while 75% of abortion patients are poor or financially-stressed people.

Which is why you must wonder if the Republican Party has drunk so much of its own Kool-Aid that they do not understand the problems that shape real Americans’ futures. It’s not transgender ideology, critical race theory, or sex talk in public schools: it’s a lack of infrastructure that would allow potential parents to afford the children they want. And here are the Democratic policies that Republicans have refused to support, just in the last four years:

  • An income-based student loan relief program that would be similar to Australia’s;
  • SNAP, the most successful nutrition program for low income children in history;
  • Expanding the Child Tax Credit to reflect inflation (this battle is going on right now; the bill passed in the House with Republican votes, but is expected to fail in the Senate);
  • Affordable housing: Republicans want to cut the HUD budget, which mostly targets low income Americans; Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, has rolled out a half-trillion dollar plan “to encourage the construction of new housing, bring down costs for renters, and make it easier for first-time buyers and veterans to purchase homes.”
  • The GOP opposes paid parental leave and universal child care, two policies that have eased the stress on family formation nearly everywhere else in the developed world.
  • Republicans have persistently opposed reforming the national health care system, regulating it to reduce and prevent abuses, and supporting Medicaid programs for low-income Americans. They have also consistently opposed a federal program to fund health care for uninsured children.

If anything reveals the bankruptcy of the Republican culture wars strategy, it is the falling national birthrate they claim to care so much about. Culture wars are, by definition, nostalgic, displaying a commitment, not to the future, but to an imagined past, one in which women (and men) who were coerced into having larger families whether they wanted to or not become uniformly happy families.

Furthermore, it is simply wrong that the childless have “no stake” in the future of the nation, as Vance asserted when he addressed the backlash to his “cat ladies” slur. Parenting is one kind of stake in the future; another is work. Teaching, designing and building things, coaching, organizing, art, opening a small business, volunteering, medicine, research, policy-making, running for office, policing, technology—any work that engages human needs—is de facto a commitment to the future.

And so are Democratic policies.

Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015.

Why Nobody Can Slut-Shame Boebert And Greene: They're 'Gun Chicks'

Why Nobody Can Slut-Shame Boebert And Greene: They're 'Gun Chicks'

After Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) disgraced herself at a Denver performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” last week by (among other things) going to third base with her date, here were three trends on X (the App Formerly Known As Twitter.) The first was the kind of name-calling you expect about any woman who is openly sexual in public: slut, skank, bimbo, whore—you choose a word for it, Boebert’s foes used it to call her out.

The second (which we will not pause on) is that political analyst Nate Silver is getting massively trolled for asserting that Boebert acting out loudly at a live performance that the rest of the audience would like to enjoy in peace is just as irrelevant as Senator John Fetterman wearing a hoodie and shorts to work. I mean, he is right, but there is a time and a place for everything, and really, no one wants to hear this now, Nate.

And the third? Sex-positive feminists reproving anyone on Twitter who called out Boebert as a slut, skank, bimbo, whore, etc.

Do you wonder why politics in this country are so screwed up? Americans would literally rather talk about hoodies, hand jobs, and whether we are all slut-shaming Lauren Boebert than policy. Across the board, the media encourages this nonsense for the sake of clicks and ad buys.

However, I must confess it had never occurred to me to call Lauren Boebert a whore until I was instructed not to. And it’s not, as Michelle Obama so quaintly said as Trump was kicking the bejesus out of Hillary Clinton with lies, insults, and conspiracy theories, because “when they go low, we go high.”

It’s because self-respecting feminists don’t characterize other women by their sexual behavior. That’s true even when said women are famous for using sexuality and gender as political weapons against other people, yet also engage in mutual groping with a male date at a regional musical theater as if she were at home watching Pornhub. The groping was, of course, only the culmination of Boebert and her date’s entitled behavior. There was also vaping, singing, dancing, loud talking, and illegal recording. You can read about the event here, with video. Or, if you just want to see Boebert getting her breasts fondled and fumbling in her date’s crotch in return, you can click here.

That said, I do not feel inclined to lecture other people who slut-shame Lauren Boebert. I think it is misguided, and it isn’t because of the unproven allegations that she actually worked as an escort on a sugar-daddy website. It’s because she has spent a lot of time and energy polishing her reputation as a Gun Chick, a popular erotic figure on the right who we might tentatively define as “the slutty girl next door—with a gun.”

It’s not an accident that Boebert looks and acts slutty; it’s calculated. It is something you are supposed to notice, and it is supposed to cause Republican dicks to lead the male voters they are attached to into the voting booth on election day. I seriously doubt that Lauren Boebert would be in the House of Representatives at all if many voters in Colorado’s Third didn’t love it that she looks and acts like such a slut with a gun.

Boebert voters, and to a lesser extent, admirers of another congressional Gun Chick, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14), do not care that they are not serious people. They do not care that these women are paid to legislate and have never actually done it. Instead, Boebert and Greene’s brand of out-there, raunchy female sexuality is central to their appeal in a right-wing party that spends much of its time not taking women seriously as human beings and trying to suppress everyone else’s sexuality and gender expression. Being dignified is “establishment,” but being slutty “makes the libs melt down.” Perhaps most importantly, it means that these women may be in authority, but they don’t have to be taken seriously because it’s all just a joke. Really, they don’t want to be in government; they just want to fuck, have fun, and shoot guns with men.

Once seen as a matched pair, Boebert and Greene shot into the spotlight in 2020 as full-fledged Christian nationalist MAGA partisans even as Trump, the guy who made them electable, was being shown the door. While Boebert periodically flew in the QAnon slipstream, Greene was a wholly convinced follower, something she renounced on the floor of the House in February 2021 after she had been kicked off all her committees for spouting weird, antisemitic conspiracies at the drop of a hat. And although they touted their “family values,” both women’s marriages quickly died after they came to Congress. Perry Greene filed for divorce in 2022, a decade after Greene reportedly had several affairs and briefly tried to ditch him. The 36-year-old Boebert dumped her husband Jayson, whom she married at sixteen. Perhaps he still loves her: he took responsibility for her disgrace at the Beetlejuice performance by admitting that he has treated her badly.

Despite their similarities, Greene and Boebert have since broken up with each other. On opposite sides of the Kevin McCarthy speaker fight, they had a final falling out in June when Boebert plagiarized MTG’s impeachment bill, and Greene called her a “little bitch” on the House floor. And yet, as Gun Chicks, the two women still call our attention to the centrality of slutty, trashy behavior to MAGA world.

Boebert owes both her business and political careers to exploiting the nexus of guns and sex that the Gun Chick represents. She and Jayson owned a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, called Shooter’s Grill (note: the name rips off the “Hooters” brand), where waitresses dressed in revealing clothing also wore pistols on their hips. Boebert first came to public attention when she confronted then-presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke in Aurora over his plan to institute federal gun control, mostly through a buy-back program. Before running for office, Boebert became a local pro-gun organizer and also publicly associated with several militia group chapters (which are full of Gun Chicks) in Colorado.

Greene, too, campaigned as a Gun Chick in 2020: among other things, she posted a video of herself brandishing a semi-automatic long gun and warning “Antifa” to “stay out of northwest Georgia.” Although Facebook pulled it down, it got over 2 million views there and another 1 million on Twitter. She also shared a second controversial image of herself with a weapon on Facebook; in the background were progressive women of color in Congress, and in the foreground, the phrase: “The Squad’s Worst Nightmare.”

The Gun Chick is always white. She meets right-wing men where they are, politically and sexually, and is, by definition, an erotic figure who captures both the allure of female beauty and the thrill of barely contained violence. She is one of many contradictory figures (for example, the large number of closeted gay men) in an extremist movement shot through with Christian Nationalism.

In Congress, Boebert and Greene represent this much larger phenomenon, draw strength from it, and style themselves in ways that other Gun Chicks and their admirers recognize. Gun Chicks wear clothes that emphasize their cleavage and large breasts, bare their arms, sport visible tattoos, are verbally aggressive (particularly with other women), and carry a weapon whenever and wherever they can.

Christian nationalism and unrestrained sexuality merge in the Gun Chick. Being a Gun Chick can be part of, or your entire, professional and social identity. For example, former porn star and stripper Alaina Hicks (a.k.a. Bonnie Rotten), who has gotten out of the business, has re-branded herself as a Second Amendment advocate and someone who has a lot of remorse for her life in porn. Now, as a Gun Chick, she’s a kind of firearms influencer who gets to wear more clothes than she formerly did when she does photo shoots. But those images never fail to draw attention to her impressive physical assets, which are accented by draping weapons over and around them.

Gun Chicks are barely restrained by clothes that are intentionally slutty: they are skin tight, falling off, and otherwise revealing of boobs, butts, and pubes. You can see this in the popular Girls With Guns calendar: here are shots from the 2020 edition, which not only feature breasts popping out of bikini tops and tac vests but incorporate porn tropes. Take a look at February’s lesbian twin scene, Miss March in full leather, or Miss April in black lingerie, fuck me shoes, and an ammunition clip directed towards the space between her legs. Then, there is Miss October, who is bruised, has a split lip, and looks to be waiting for her abuser to come home so she can take him out with what looks to be a small shotgun. And this is a site with high production values. You can visit a cheaper, sadder version of Gun Chick World on the subreddit r/hotchickswithguns.

In other words, Gun Chicks are, by definition, slutty. You can slut-shame them if you like, but it only makes them stronger—which is why it is stupid to get involved with defending someone like Lauren Boebert from slut-shaming. It would be like trying to humiliate Jim Jordan for acting like a rabid animal all the time or criticizing Ted Cruz for acting like a stupid person. It’s part of the package and part of the brand.

So, my fellow feminists, if you wish to go high in this case, be my guest. But you aren’t fighting a battle that Lauren Boebert is interested in. Boebert’s sluttiness is intentional, and it’s something she works hard at. And she knows that what she did in that Denver theater will only make the people who voted for her love her more.

Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian at the New School for Social Research. She is executive editor of Public Seminar and was the author of the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. She lives in New York City.

President Joe Biden

What The Media Gets Wrong About The Centerpiece Of Biden's Agenda

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Last week's election results, which showed modest Republican gains across the nation, set off alarm bells in America's pundit class about the power of progressives in the Democratic party.

Democrats promised change, the Times contrarian Maureen Dowd complained, and instead offered "wokeness" and infighting. Bloomberg's Ramesh Ponnuru warned that even though the Virginia governor's race normally means nothing, former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe's loss was a "portent" and "bad news" for the national party as it moved forward on a human infrastructure package.

Why? As the editorial board of the New York Times warned, with Joe Biden's $1.75 trillion Build Back Better framework, Democrats were moving too far to the left. "The concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government," the Times wrote, "should not be dismissed."

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll argues that 52 percent of Americans prefer a smaller government, up an alarming 11 percent since last year. But does this mean Biden should scale back his aspirations?

No.

It means Americans are radically underinformed.

In every industrialized country but the United States, government programs perform an essentially moderate task. By supporting workers, they support business. They create vital economies that support well-paying jobs. They keep workers healthy, and vulnerable family members safe. They lower tuitions, train workers so that employers don't have to, and make it possible for students to pay back modest loans at affordable rates.

And best of all — if you are one of those centrists — government programs keep people at work. There is no more graphic example of how the United States has failed at this than the number of healthy Americans who cannot, or will not, return to their jobs.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of mid-October, 10.4 million jobs are unfilled. More than 1 million of those workers are mothers who cannot find, or afford, childcare. Some missing workers — 80,000 truck drivers, for example — mean American consumers face shortages of everything from paper towels to covid tests as container ships bob offshore. And prior to the pandemic, school districts in the United States were already short 110,000 teachers.

Republicans, and some centrist Democratic senators, such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, argue it won't. Government "giveaways," we are told, will only make Americans dependent and cripple the economy with higher taxes.

Manchin complains the US will move "toward an entitlement mentality" if Americans who can care for themselves without government help don't. And Sinema, who has raised almost $1 million in donations from lobbying groups, has given a thumbs down to higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, making Build Back Better even harder for deficit hawks in the Democratic Party.

But it isn't clear what Republicans know that conservatives in other countries don't. The United States is the only industrialized country that does not offer paid family leave, and universal childcare, healthcare, and eldercare. In the United States, not only new parents, but sick and injured workers, are back on the job long before they are ready and able to work. And those who can't pay someone to care for family members have to cut back on consumption: experts estimate that American business may be leaving $28.5 billion a year on the table when families re-budget to account for a lost salary.

There is no question that all these policies are moderate because they benefit business. They keep families consuming, and they bring valued workers back on the job rested, healthy and focused. Similarly, knowing that elders and children are well cared for, at an affordable cost, means that families can plan for the big items that drive a healthy economy: houses, cars and appliances, and the thousands of skilled jobs the market in durable goods support.So how would Build Back Better make American business stronger?

But perhaps the biggest categories of government spending that could drive the United States economy are healthcare and education. These economic categories are not only a leading cause of national consumer indebtedness, but also of corporate spending. The cost of college doubles every nine years, and medical debt is currently pegged at $140 billion. Worse, healthcare costs are expected to rise almost six percent through 2028, well above the projected GDP of 4.3 percent.

Why is this bad for business? Because the employers who offer healthcare coverage for over 23 million American workers spent almost $14,000 per employee in 2020. That's over $3.2 trillion.

That number is only slightly less than President Biden requested to pay for a capacious package of universal programs, a number that has been whittled down to half that amount. And corporations spend billions more to administer these programs.

Last Friday, the House finally passed the $1.2 trillion hard infrastructure framework: it had yes votes from Manchin, Sinema — and even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, 17 other conservative senators and 13 House Republicans. Why?

Because it was bold in its scope but moderate in its vision. Businesses know they can't compete in a global economy without modern transportation, roads, technology and data security, and that only federal spending and coordination makes national projects possible.

Human infrastructure — healthcare, eldercare, childcare, education and family stability — is also good for business.

It's not progressive. It's just common sense.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian at the New School for Social Research. She is executive editor of Public Seminar and was the author of the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. She lives in New York City.

Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy

Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy

With fake news on Facebook, trolls on Twitter, and viral outrage everywhere, it's easy to believe that the internet changed politics entirely. In Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy, historian Claire Bond Potter reveals the real roots of today's dysfunction by situating online politics in a longer history of alternative political media. Soon after World War II, pioneers on the left and right began to develop alternative outlets that made politics more popular, and ultimately, more partisan. When campaign operatives took up e-mail, blogging, and social media in a new century, they supercharged those trends.

The following is drawn from Chapter 8, MYBARACKOBAMA, which looks behind the pioneering digital strategies of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

The same passion that brought [veteran Democratic consultant David] Axelrod to Obama also drew a much younger, but equally successful, digital alternative media professional to the campaign. When 23 year-old Chris Hughes took leave from Facebook, the company he had cofounded with Mark Zuckerberg three years earlier, to work with the Obama campaign, he found that despite its eighteen million users, Axelrod and his seasoned operatives neither knew nor cared about the alternative media platform devoted to personal storytelling, friendship, and community building. And yet, everyone in Obama headquarters used digital tools nonstop. Speechwriter Ben Rhodes remembers the young digital natives on the campaign routinely "communicating by Instant Messenger even when we were sitting next to each other." However, Hughes was warned not to speak of Obama as a "Facebook candidate," and to instead say that he was an "organizer," like everyone else, because "the campaign and its energy were not about Facebook at all." Undaunted, Hughes spent his early weeks building a social network around the candidate, using all the digital tools available. Most crucially, he brokered the purchase of a popular MySpace page, MyBarackObama, that a supporter had built after Obama's 2004 convention keynote. It had already accrued 160,000 subscribers.

While they made an establishment campaign consultant like Axelrod nervous, he knew these techniques were the future. Netroots volunteers had ideas about how to "brand" their candidate and "sell" him to their peers, and they were not shy about sharing them with the campaign chiefs. Axelrod had interacted with these activists before when he ran Deval Patrick's 2006 campaign for Governor of Massachusetts. These "young insurgents, some of whom were refugees from Howard Dean's failed presidential bid . . . had glimpsed the potential of the Internet," Axelrod recalled, "and tech-savvy Massachusetts proved to be fertile ground for their new, expansive digital strategies."

Obama's 2008 victory would later be framed in terms of the campaign's mastery of digital alternative media channels, but its leadership, drawn from the political consulting establishment, was reluctant to give authority to progressive populists at the grassroots who might be difficult to control. The many successes of the Dean campaign, such as DeanLink and CivicSpace, built on the early popularity of social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook. But its failures—the high burn rate of campaign funds, overreliance on digital outreach, failure to cultivate mainstream media outlets, and supporters' often eccentric and unrestrained sense of humor—told a cautionary tale about progressive populism's potential for sending a campaign off the rails. Hughes struggled to persuade Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe that social media networks were made up of real people, a new generation of potential political junkies who influenced each other. Making good on Obama's promise that "this campaign is about you," Hughes argued, was more important than Axelrod's insistence that the campaign, not a network of digital volunteers, control the message. Initially rebuffed as "the crazy tech guys in the corner," Hughes and his team began to prove their point with results. By the end of the campaign, the MySpace platform Hughes bought had racked up 2 million friends. Supporters had "planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fundraising pages."

While Obama did not seem to have to work hard to be liked by Democrats, despite her extensive digital outreach, Clinton was saddled with a perception that she was unlikable, stiff, and inauthentic. As cultural critic Susan Bordo reflected later, even Clinton's accomplishments were used against her. Her "polish and poise" were read as insincerity, her familiarity with a broad range of issues as ambition and opportunism. The liberal and feminist blogospheres split bitterly on this issue. Obama and Clinton partisans littered each other's blogs and supporters' social media with vicious comments. Bloggers at Daily Kos, journalist James Wolcott wrote, "faced off like the Jets and the Sharks," a reference to the 1957 Broadway play about gang rivalries, West Side Story.

Unquestionably, the Obama team owned YouTube, and that, too, became a vehicle for creating suspicion about Clinton as conspiracy theories circulating about her on conservative populist sites leaked into the Democratic primary. In March 2007, Obama supporter Philip de Vellis created a mash-up of the now-classic Apple "1984" ad. Now titled "Vote Different," it superimposed Clinton's campaign launch speech on the screen that had displayed Big Brother in the original version. Designed to emphasize Clinton's establishment credentials and association with a controlling federal government, by implication, it promoted Obama's antiestablishment, even revolutionary, potential. As Clinton spoke, the same torpid audience listened, but the hammer thrower wore a singlet with the Obama campaign logo. The final screen read: "On January 14th, the Democratic primary will begin. And you'll see why 2008 won't be like '1984.'" Like the earlier Macintosh ad, this video went viral. One media scholar, blogger, and confessed political junkie remained unsure about how such interventions would reshape the campaign, but admitted that he found "the underlying message of citizen empowerment" in the video "irresistible."

Clinton partisans continued to resent what they saw as mainstream and alternative media bias against their candidate. Indeed, the New York Times assigned newcomer Amy Chozick to Clinton, perhaps believing that her gender was more important than experience: Chozick had never covered a single political campaign and never fully connected with the candidate. Worse, as younger female voters migrated to Obama, some older progressive white women, whom Clinton had imagined to be her core constituency, cooled on her as well. In 2007, a multigenerational group of women writers, journalists, and academics agreed that Clinton was not resonating with them. Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary was a collection of essays published as the campaign was getting off the ground: in them, feminists agreed that Clinton did not meet the challenge of authenticity, which was "shaping up to be the buzzword of the 2008 campaign." Why was she simultaneously so well-known and so unknowable? they asked.

How had professional media women who had supported Clinton through the eight years of her husband's presidency and worn buttons that asked voters to "Elect Hillary's husband" come to dislike and distrust her? How did media women fail to identify with an establishment candidate whose life, successes, and challenges, in many ways, paralleled their own. One answer was that feminism was no longer a sufficient bridge between generations, nor did it speak to the growing partisan divide between establishment liberals and progressive populists in the Democratic Party. Novelist Lorrie Moore saw Clinton's public persona as "too often in pragmatic retreat, overmanaged, increasingly botoxed and schoolmarmish." Political journalist Jane Kramer, reflecting on the Cleavagegate controversy, wanted Clinton to be "a good, generous, and loving person and a steely, scary, effective person." According to novelist Lauren Collins, compared to Obama's direct online connection to voters, Clinton's budding social media presence was "frumpy," just an online version of her managed mainstream media image. Ignoring Obama's thin history as an elected official, Judith Thurman charged that Clinton had paid her political dues, but "not from her own account," running for Senate in a state "where she had no roots" (something that was far from unprecedented, particularly in New York). Some of the authors remarked that Clinton's feminism was simply outdated. "There's something about the reality of Hillary Clinton, the accommodations she's made and the roles she's played, that leaves many of us cold," grumbled Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.

At a moment when progressive populism was on the ascendant in the Democratic Party, Clinton's inability to persuade voters that as a woman, she, too, was an outsider to the establishment, was fatal to a national candidacy. By contrast, the Obama team, however reluctantly at first, successfully leveraged digital alternative media support to redefine the race as a generational contest and capture everyone outside the establishment, regardless of gender or race. The Democratic National Committee helped to push this narrative by reframing traditional political rituals. On July 23, 2007, the eight candidates in the race—Clinton, Obama, Joe Biden, Edwards, Christopher Dodd, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson—debuted in a debate broadcast on CNN and YouTube, where viewers were invited to send in their questions. The United States Department of State billed the event as a triumph of American political values, inspired and facilitated by the internet. "Politicians accustomed to controlling discussions saw people in T-shirts pose cheeky, incisive questions from all over the country and the world," one press release read. "One question came from an aid worker surrounded by children at a refugee camp in Darfur, Sudan." YouTube was becoming a primary destination for all populist political junkies that year. When they learned that Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul was receiving more hits on YouTube there than any Democrat or Republican, the Republican National Committee quickly announced a YouTube debate for November.

Social media was now a routine tool for political campaigns and for the political establishment. Politicians used it not only to capture the grassroots zeitgeist but also to reach demographics beyond the youth vote, as older people increasingly adopted Facebook. And yet, although the internet was still cheap, it was also still a labor-intensive site for strategizing a campaign. Before turning over the Barack Obama MySpace page to the campaign, its creator had invested thousands of unpaid hours administering it. By March 2007, he sometimes spent his entire evening just approving friend requests. Perhaps this was why one marketing professor who reviewed the sites and apps being used by every campaign in 2007 found many of them hard to navigate, disconnected, and sometimes abandoned.

While maintaining control of their message, the Obama team found creative ways to keep the netroots occupied and energized, while generating content that had a fresh, antiestablishment look. Midway through the primary season, the campaign launched a contest that invited supporters to produce their own political commercials. Sponsored by MoveOn, the "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest was inspired by an earlier, far more divisive 2004 MoveOn contest, "Bush in 30 Seconds," in which political junkies had been invited to create attack ads. This time, makers were carefully instructed to create a positive message. Of course, both worked, since the secret to YouTube virality was to inspire emotion in viewers that caused them to want to view the video repeatedly and share it with others. Videos created by the grass roots were likely to meet that standard; carefully crafted and focus-group-tested videos generated by the Clinton campaign were not.

Organizations like MoveOn, Blue State Digital, and ActBlue, which emerged from the 2004 campaign with powerful email lists of progressive populists, played a game-changing role in 2008 as digital alternative media moved to center stage for fundraising and voter outreach. Well in advance of primary voting, MoveOn, now a political action committee, endorsed Obama, the first time it had ever explicitly supported a candidate. It was also a sign that the netroots alternative media apparatus was throwing its weight behind a challenge to the Democratic political establishment whose most influential, often invisible fundraisers and power brokers were used to picking the candidate they planned to support. MoveOn was now a fundraising and digital alternative media giant. Yet the organization still insisted on its grassroots identity, the importance of small-donation fundraising, and on acknowledging its constituency as collaborators from whom it solicited advice and ideas, not just money. By extension, Obama became the grassroots candidate, a brand that was, ironically, strengthened by his thin political experience.

Why not invite voters with no experience in campaign advertising to join the party? The MoveOn contest rules stated that the ads were not for profit and could not be copyrighted. Instead, the group encouraged the use of the Creative Commons license developed by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. Capitalizing on the cultural obsession with reality television contests, the crowd would vote to choose the finalists. The winners would be chosen by a jury of celebrity Democrats that included blogger Markos Moulitsas; progressive actors Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Adrian Grenier; feminist Naomi Wolf; and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Running the contest allowed MoveOn to identify even more potential Obama supporters as they registered with the site to view the videos and choose their favorites, adding 5.5 million emails to their supporter list. Data collected during those visits also identified the digital profile, and physical location, of each participant. The winner, "Obamacan," featured John Weiler, an Air Force veteran and Republican crossover voter. It ended with a catchphrase that gestured to the growing political divisions between right and left that digital alternative media were accelerating: "Bringing America Together."

Excerpted from Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracyby Claire Bond Potter. Copyright © 2020. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.