Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast Claire Potter

The situation comedy Leave it to Beaver, which ran from 1957 to 1963, was one of many half-hour comedies that idealized the American post-war suburbs, always portraying them as uniformly white and a refuge where children got into “scrapes”—but not real trouble. From left: Hugh Beaumont (Ward), Tony Dow (Wally), Barbara Billingsley (June), Jerry Mathers (Theodore AKA "Beaver"). Photo credit: ABC/Wikimedia Commons
I grew up in a place called the Main Line, a string of suburbs outside Philadelphia. The area got its nickname from a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad first laid in the early 19th century as part of a Federalist public works program. In the next several decades, the railroad also became a passenger line, ferrying upper-class Philadelphians, eager to escape the summer’s heat and epidemic diseases, out to the healthful Haverford and Bryn Mawr hotels.
But by the late 19th century, that Main Line train was ferrying businessmen, who now lived in suburbs built around the railroad, in and out of the city every day. Today, men and women can still walk to the train from their homes. Children who attend private schools that are also situated near the tracks (Baldwin, the one I attended, is in the old Bryn Mawr Hotel) can also be seen trudging off to the train like the little professional workers they will become.
But one thing has changed. Those suburbs, which were almost uniformly white for decades, are now integrated—if not by class, then by race. As prices for one-bedroom apartments in places like New York top a million dollars, a three-bedroom house with a broad expanse of lawn may even seem—affordable?
Something else changed too. Those suburbs used to be solidly Republican, but now Main Line voters are far more likely to vote with Democratic Philadelphia.
Oh sure, there are still some Republicans in those fancy houses. That’s why Donald J. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, was in my hometown on November 6, 2016, two days before the election, telling her audience that it was an honor to speak to the white suburban women who had volunteered for the campaign.
When I saw this on the evening news, I was shocked, but not nearly as shocked as I was on November 9 when I learned that my home state—my hometown—had been among the metropolitan regions producing the razor-thin margins of votes that elevated Ivanka Trump’s pussy-grabbing father to the Presidency of the United States.
But the good news is: it didn’t last. When the GOP embraced extremism, the Pennsylvania suburbs east of the Appalachian mountains roared back. Suburban voters provided the margin of victory for Joe Biden in 2020, and have consistently handed the GOP loss after loss, turning red states purple, and purple states blue. And it’s not just Pennsylvania. Republican suburbanites in bright red states are also voting to preserve the right to choose abortion in the post-Dobbs era.
Why? Well, we can point to that diversity I mentioned at the top of the show. Dr. Jasmine Clark, a Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives, described the pockets of support for African American minister and sitting Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in the 2022 by-election. Her prediction was that the suburbs were changing, and that Warnock would win.
Dr. Clark was right, and today Georgia has not one, but two, Democratic Senators.
The suburbs have never been more important to our political life than they will be in 2024. They are also important in every other respect: 69% of Americans now live in an area defined as suburban, and every policy has its greatest impact on suburban citizens.
But it’s also true, as my guest historian Becky Nicolaides underscores in her book, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945(Oxford University Press, 2024), that suburban America has always been less white and more complex—in its class structure, its built environment, its relationship to the city, and its attractiveness to

It’s the summer of 1978, three years after the end of an American war in Vietnam that Joan Baez and other musicians had lifted their voices to oppose. On this day, Baez is giving a live, outdoor concert in Norway. Bantering with an audience of young Norwegians, she smiles to a happy, shirtless youth and segues into her next number: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
Canadian Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist of The Band, wrote that song for his drummer, Southerner Levon Helm, in 1968. The original, backed by a Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel blues harmony, describes the pain and despair of Virgil Kane, a Southern railroad worker who watches the Confederacy crumble before his eyes in 1865.
Although this powerful ballad can be seen as an anti-war song, it also sentimentalizes the “Lost Cause” myth —a cherished dream of the independent Southern nation, based on white supremacy, that might have been had the Confederacy not lost the Civil War. As in other cultural renditions of this alternative South, in which all white men are equal and have dignity, the song conceals the causes of the war: a violent, illegal rebellion that sought to preserve racial slavery. Talking to one interviewer who raised this issue, Robertson again returned to mythmaking. The song, he recalled, had its origins in a conversation with Levon Helms’s father, a poor, white Delta farmer, about what his family lost in 1865.
In the interview, Robertson says he felt like he was writing a movie: in fact, he was transcribing, and embellishing on, a myth, one that figured rebellious Southerners as the victims of violence, not the cause of it, much as those being held in jail for the failed coup of January 6, 2021, are perceived by Donald Trump’s supporters as martyrs.
Nevertheless, it’s a powerful song, and it became an instant folk-rock hit when it was released in 1969. It climbed even higher in 1971 when Baez recorded it for her double album Blessed Are. But why was Baez, a longstanding supporter of the Black Civil Rights movement, singing such a song in the first place? And why was she still singing it on August 1, 2017, this time accompanied by the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter, even as Donald Trump’s MAGA crowds declared themselves descendants of that same Confederacy?
A better question might be: how do myths provoke feelings so powerful that even people with progressive politics like Baez stop paying attention to the dangerous, false histories they promote? And who better to turn to for answers, at a time when the Donald Trump MAGA myth machine promotes the worst aspects of American history as virtues, than American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin? A former colleague, friend, and mentor from my Wesleyan University days, Slotkin has spent a career exploring the violence at the center of the American past, and how it is both concealed and elevated by national mythmaking.
Just to reassure you: not all myths are bad. After all, if the Confederacy represented one myth about the American founding, the Union government represented another. As Lincoln put it in the 1864 Gettysburg address, that myth was that the nation’s founders “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
That was a myth too—but it’s one that we who love democracy are willing to fight for still, and one that those who do not love democracy—Donald Trump and his allies—are determined to defeat. In his new book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (Belknap Press, 2024), Slotkin examines the history of the two Americas that exist side-by-side today, with their clashing and common myths, two American cultures that will meet at the ballot box in November 2024 to decide the fate of American democracy.
Show notes:
* Richie refers to the American “myth of the frontier.” There are many worthwhile things to read on this topic, but one of

If you have ever attended one of former President Donald Trump’s rallies, seen one on TV, or even just watched Fox News regularly, you may have seen people wearing tee shirts that have “Gays for Trump” written on the front. Did you think they were planted by the campaign? Or that any gay, lesbian, or transgender person who supported the current Republican Party was deluded? Or a simpleton?
I’ll be the first to confess that, even as a historian who knows that ideology and identity do not map onto each other in obvious ways, I was stunned when I walked out of a Ben Shapiro keynote at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2018, where the rabble-rousing reactionary journalist had rejected homophobia but embraced hatred of trans people. Then, I saw two women holding a trans flag that declared: We Are Trans and We Are Conservative.
It was incredibly brave. But here’s where I reveal my inner b***h queen. When I went downstairs to the exhibit hall and stumbled over a Log Cabin Republicans table staffed by two skinny, rumpled, nervous white men who were made even more anxious when approached by an obvious lesbian, my first thought was: what sad little queers they are.
Well, shame on me.
Those men had fought for their table at CPAC, a particularly difficult task since high-profile gay conservative influencer and youth organizer Milo Yiannopoulos had been disinvited the previous year for having shared fond memories of oral sex with a priest as an underaged teen.
In fact, Yiannopoulos is an exception to the history of LGBT people in the GOP, and not because he was, and is, so out of the closet—although now he says he’s straight. Instead, queer Republicans have historically been the definition of rectitude and respectability, men and women who often did come out in defense of their rights: to be free of state surveillance, to serve in the armed forces, to marry, and to adopt children.
That’s still true today. And like other Republicans, LGBT conservatives are often businesspeople who believe in individual freedom, family, low taxes, deregulation, God, and a strong national defense. If you go to the Log Cabin Republicans site today, you’ll see a full-throated endorsement of these values, updated for the Trump era.
(You can listen to Charles Moran, a representative of Log Cabin Republicans, endorse Donald Trump on Fox News in 2019. As yet, the group has not made an endorsement for 2024.)
And of course, much of what Log Cabin Republicans argued about Trump was true in 2019. Trump was in favor of same-sex marriage during the 2016 campaign, whereas both Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama before her, were reluctant to challenge their political advisors’ wisdom that it diminished their electability. Listeners may recall that it was President Joe Biden, then Obama’s vice president, who endorsed gay marriage in May 2012 on NBC’s Meet the Press.”
The history of LGBT politics is complicated, to say the very least. And that’s why I invited my fellow historian, journalist, podcaster and friend Neil J. Young on the show to talk about his new book, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024). As Neil explains, battling detractors on their left and homophobia to their right, gay Republicans have nevertheless played power politics for over 80 years, sometimes in coalition with liberal groups—and sometimes even founding advocacy organizations like One, Inc. that we think of as liberal in their origins. You’re going to learn things in this episode that I didn’t even know before I read Coming Out Republican.
Show notes:
* Claire begins by asking Neil to discuss the role of conservatives in founding the nation’s first homophile organizations. “Homophile” was a word that embraced the spectrum of pro-lesbian and gay politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. You can read more about this movement in a book edited by a character in Neil’s book: W. Dorr Legg, Homophi

Content warning: this podcast discusses sexual assault and other forms of violence.
We begin this episode with Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. She is discussing an international investigation of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed over Israel’s border and triggered the current and devastating war in Gaza.
The most damaging attack since the 1948 war, more Israelis were killed in a single event than at any time since the Holocaust. Hamas fighters killed 695 civilians (36 of whom were children), 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The attackers took around 250 hostages, which included at least thirty children and several dozen contract workers from countries other than Israel. Thousands were wounded.
Within a week, Israel initiated a terrifyingly violent attack designed to destroy Hamas, a military force embedded in a civilian population. By October 13, experts predicted the humanitarian catastrophe that has since unfolded. By the end of January 2024, the civilian infrastructure, layered on top of thousands of miles of Hamas military tunnels, was between 50 and 60% damaged or destroyed. Hamas claims that over 30,000 Palestinians, the majority of them noncombatants, have been killed. As I record this podcast, Israeli forces are planning to move over a million sick, injured, and starving Palestinian refugees out of Rafah, in southern Gaza, to pursue the elimination of Hamas there as well.
I want to note that, while we all deplore unbridled violence, Israel’s strategy is not unique, and it is frequently used in places where insurgent fighters are not fully embedded in urban infrastructure. Carpet bombing civilians was invented in World War II, and the United States destroyed two Japanese cities with nuclear weapons, causing generational suffering. So-called “surgical” strikes were used by the US in both Iraq wars, bombing designed to deny the state access to water and power, and which killed civilians immediately and over time. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin pursued the strategy of destroying entire cities, along with cultural centers, hospitals, and schools, in Chechnya. In Ukraine, Russian missiles continue to pound civilians and civilian infrastructure far from the front. Bashar al-Assad, the authoritarian President of Syria, also used these tactics against political dissenters in his own country.
Forcing states, or insurrectionist forces, to capitulate by killing, starving, torturing, and sexually assaulting civilians is not historically new or uncommon. That said, accusations of rape, sexualized murders and genital mutilation of women and children on October 7 have proven particularly, and unexpectedly, controversial. Despite eyewitness testimony and visual evidence, Hamas has denied these attacks, while some pro-Palestinian journalists in the United States have gone to great lengths to sow doubt about sexual violence, and to deny that it was part of the repertoire of terror that day.
Denialism and doubt serve an important propaganda role, to be sure. But fifty years of feminist scholarship also demonstrates that war does not occur without sexual assault, just as it cannot be prosecuted without civilian casualties. The idea that you can have war without rape, on all sides, is historically implausible.
And yet, to understand how war works, acknowledging and investigating these crimes is not where our conversation about gender and war can end. How men, women, and children experience violent conflict inspires, sustains, and promotes war. Women are not just the passive victims of violence, they are the ones who give birth to soldiers, become soldiers, support military operations, and care for the wounded—often for life. Men are raped. Palestinian mothers and fathers, like women in conflict zones everywhere, currently care for and feed families in reduced, terrifying, and exposed circumstances. Women are counted

That was a small portion of the State of the Union speech that President Joe Biden gave on the evening of February 7, 2023. By the time many of you listen to this episode, Biden will have delivered his 2024 message to Congress, one that is widely expected to lay out his agenda for a second term and provide a compelling argument for the voters to give him a Democratic House and Senate to work with.
Biden is commonly criticized, not for his abilities, but for his age. And yet, age makes him an important link to the past and tells us a great deal about his embrace of a political agenda forwarded by the Democratic party’s Progressive caucus.
Why has Biden, an establishment Democrat, gotten behind LGBT rights, women’s rights, racial justice, and anti-poverty programs? Because he is a liberal. Although today, the word “liberal” is synonymous with moderation and centrism, that isn’t its history. For much of the twentieth century it was liberals—in both the Democratic and the Republican parties—who pushed American society closer to equality.
Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, liberals—often culling ideas from socialists, feminists, and populists—were the leading figures of the American progressive movement. We forget that at our peril, and if you watch tonight’s State of the Union, you will see how liberals transformed politics. Seated behind Biden’s right shoulder will be Kamala Harris, the first woman, Black, and South Asian person to become Vice President of the United States. In front of Biden will be Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to occupy the Speaker’s Chair and Hakeem Jefferies, the first Black American to serve as the Leader of either party. And there will be Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s only Supreme Court appointment and the first Black woman to serve in that role.
Joe Biden didn’t make today’s Democratic party: he inherited it from Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. On January 3, 1973, when Biden took his first oath as the junior Senator from Delaware, Humphrey may even have been in the audience. Watching this fiery, 31-year-old liberal, Humphrey might have recalled his own arrival on the floor as a freshly minted, 37-year-old Senator. A rising star in the Democratic party when he took the oath in 1949, Humphrey became the leader of the party’s liberal faction when, as the progressive “Boy Mayor” of Minneapolis, he fought for, and won, a civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic platform.
When you listen to the speech, you can hear the boos among the cheers. Humphrey’s words caused numerous segregationist Southern delegates, led by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, to leave the national convention in Philadelphia. Mounting a third party Dixiecrat candidacy with Thurmond at the top of the ticket, within 20 years, these Southerners would find a home in an increasingly conservative Republican party determined to turn back the civil rights achievements of the 1960s and 1970s.
That’s the world we live in today: Republicans occupy the political right, referring to Democrats uniformly as “the Left.”
Ironically, many progressive Democrats disdain liberals, viewing them as the most conservative wing of their own coalition. But that’s not what it means to be liberal. Instead, liberalism, as it first cohered in the New Deal, then Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, and then Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, imagines that government’s role is to take the actions, provide the support, and pass the laws that free all Americans to prosper.
This is why I invited James Traub, a journalist, historian, and expert on liberalism to talk to us today about his new book, True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America (Basic Books, 2024.) Traub takes us from Humphrey’s roots in a small South Dakota town to his years as party whip in the Senate and then Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, and his role in masterminding passage of the landmark 1964 Civ

The first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in late December 2019, near a lab in Wuhan, China that may or may not have been responsible for accidentally releasing the virus into the wild.
The disaster that took shape around the world in the following weeks was like watching someone fall from a skyscraper in slow motion. The first case of Covid-19 in the United States was diagnosed on January 20, 2020. But even though there had been three weeks to make contingency plans to defend against a fast-moving and deadly virus, the White House seemed almost paralyzed. Donald Trump, consumed with his reelection campaign, did not declare the public health emergency that gave his administration broad powers to act until January 31.
Trump, of course, believed that a wall stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico would keep undocumented immigrants from crossing the southern border. So, in retrospect, it makes sense that he rolled out only one major policy response in the next five weeks: he stopped travel from China.
This neither stopped the spread of a virus that was already in the United States, nor did it keep out infected travelers from other countries. By the time Trump allocated $8.3 billion for emergency health care on March 6, and declared a national emergency on March 13, there were 2,000 known infections and 41 deaths. Health care workers were starting to work double shifts; six states had closed their schools to prevent spread; and the New York Times predicted that as many as 2.4 million Americans could soon be competing for 925,000 hospital beds.
New York City was an early epicenter, and everything fell apart on March 20.
We all know what happened next. People who could leave cities did. Medical and nursing schools graduated their classes early and sent young health care workers into the hospitals to support already fatigued staffs. Students attended school, as best they could, online. Amazon and food delivery orders went through the roof. And work, if you still had it, became very complicated. Some non-essential workers were sent home to work online, and others were laid off and left to fend for themselves. Essential workers had to keep working, no matter what. Often the poorest and most vulnerable among us, they were constantly exposed to the virus with little or no protection.
Who would, or would not, physically survive the pandemic was one question, but economic survival was part of that equation. And the divisions between us initially crystalized around which laid off workers had access to the social safety net. W-2 workers were eligible for unemployment: they paid social security taxes every month. But 1099 workers, a growing category of contingent laborers who work as independent contractors, were not.
Then, there are other divides that crosscut the 1099 category: people who worked in bricks and mortar businesses and those whose labor was contracted through platforms like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Instacart—gig workers who made an income with their own vehicles, tools, homes, and hustle. There were people who still had jobs, others who had worked several jobs and lost a few of them, and some who suddenly lost all of their income.
As the world of work sagged and collapsed, University of North Carolina sociologist and W-2 worker Alexandrea Ravenelle decided to document this economic shock in real time. Ravenelle had just published Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy (University of California Press, 2019.) She jumped on social media to locate and interview precarious, or suddenly precarious, workers about their survival strategies. Ravenelle listened as people told her how they navigated government programs, avoided scams and predators, and balanced multiple jobs. She found out how a sudden infusion of money--$1000 a week—could create the mental and economic space for a worker to rethink, re-set, and plan their life.
And Ravenelle learned that a universal basic income