Call Her Harris: The VP’s Podcast Week

The Week in Review: October 7, 2024

While talking to Compact-contributor Ross Barkan earlier this week, he mentioned being relieved to see Vice President Harris has finally started appearing on podcasts, which he’s been insisting would be a strategic move to boost her campaign. Her appearances on the Howard Stern Show and the Call Her Daddy podcast have set the internet abuzz. 

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I hoped that Harris would let loose with Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy and show her playful side. Instead, Cooper chose to focus primarily on policy, starting with laws protecting women from violence, and then taking a nosedive toward abortion. I had hoped that we had learned to speak about these issues with just a tad of reason and nuance. But no. The two read off of the classic, embarrassingly pedestrian script about the wicked sexists trying to rob women of their rights.

I couldn’t help but think of the ardently pro-choice Camille Paglia who once argued that her fellow pro-choicers ought to stop painting the pro-life argument in such a reductive light, and instead attempt in good faith to contend with its “morally superior” claim that a defenseless fetus deserves protection by the law. Harris and Cooper would do well to heed her advice. Of course, the pro-life movement is not immune to dumbing down the discourse. Thankfully, pro-lifers like New Wave Feminists founder Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa and Consistent Life Ethic-supporter Charles Camosy offer a much needed antidote to the “women who get abortions are baby murderers”-type rhetoric that can be heard within their own camp.

This Week in Compact

Marking the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, Leon Wielsteltier warns that “post-traumatic rationality” is “a formula for the perpetuation of the mentalities that prepared or perpetrated the violence. … Israelis and Palestinians, they share so much: pain, and fear, and rage, and despair,” he continues, “and children. Can’t those commonalities become a foundation for peace? Aren’t they tired yet?”

Matthew Walther sees a change in Trump’s campaign: a pivot toward courting “moderate middle-class white suburbanites.” “Contrary to the widespread assumption that his incendiary rhetoric aims to stoke ‘white rural rage,’ it is precisely when he is courting these upscale voters that we find him at his most incoherent and demagogic.” While Trump’s amoralist musings once alienated liberal voters, it is now increasingly alienating traditional social conservatives.

In response to a preliminary injunction granted against a new California law “prohibiting the use of AI-generated deepfakes in political advertisements,” Jacques Berlinerblau says that the “ruling follows a judicial trend of prioritizing expressive liberty above anything else, like the need to not have American minds kidnapped en masse by disinformation.”

Timothy Shenk’s book Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics? “endorses the basic ‘popularist’ stance when he asserts, for instance, the necessity of ‘finding a position on questions like crime and immigration that fits within the broad center of public opinion.’” In his review, Geoff Shullenberger says that “the book pays more attention to the rightward gravitation of the working class than the leftward migration of elite professionals, but the latter is the key factor here: It has forged an ideological culture more responsive to academic fads, grant funding, and the cues of an insular social-media bubble than to public opinion writ large.”

Patrick Brown fears that “making marriage an explicitly partisan issue will polarize relations between the sexes even more, and put further downwards pressures on birth rates. Prescribing marriage as a political cure-all,” he continues, “rather than finding messengers and messages that can appeal to both sexes, will leave proponents of the nuptial solution to GOP woes stranded at the altar.”

Director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life William Thibeau challenges those who would apply DEI to military enlistment. Identity based quotas have no place in military affairs, he argues, which “must be a place for rigorous adherence to meritocracy, because the crucible of war gives no quarter to a person or unit that is anything but qualified.”

“At the heart of strategic philanthropy,” write Michael Hartmann and William Schmabra, “is the determination to hold a grantee to measurable outcomes. That approach may merit criticism even when a grantee is a nonprofit,” but “it is another thing altogether when a grantee is the government.”

Ross Barkan says that Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited Megalopolis “is neither as far-reaching nor as demented as its reputation suggests.” Though his “praise is qualified, tentative even,” he does believe the film “is more a success than a failure.”

Trevor Merrill reviews the long-awaited English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Annihilation, highlighting its “religious energies,” which “end up being both too diffuse and too esoteric to bridge the personal and the public.”

And in her review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book on his 10-day trip to Palestine and Israel, Helen Andrews says that the author’s “fundamental problem is that he is a narcissist.” 

Make sure to check out this week’s podcast episode on Hurricane Helene and political deepfakes, as well as Geoff’s discussion with William Thibeau on his piece.

All things to all people

Given the poor state of public discourse, I don’t take for granted people like Paglia, De La Rosa, and Camosy, as well as recent Blame Theory guests David Shields and Musa al-Gharbi, who are able to say something of substance that anyone with common sense—regardless of their ideological persuasion—can recognize as reasonable. 

Having lived and worked in a variety of ideological spaces, another skill I’ve come to appreciate is knowing how to right-code what are commonly considered left-wing talking points, and vice versa. Though sometimes taking a definitive and unequivocal stance is called for, I tend to find Saint Paul’s exhortation to learn to “become all things to all people” to be an effective strategy for fostering social cohesion and bringing about the common good.