Pantsuit Politics is celebrating ten years of podcasting this year!

A lot has happened politically, culturally, and personally in the last ten years. This summer, we’re going to revisit each of the years we’ve been podcasting with a special flashback episode. Today, we begin with a look back on our earliest days as podcasters in 2015.

We’d love for you to celebrate with us! Join us for our 10th birthday celebration in Cincinnati, OH - or with a virtual ticket - this July 19. Learn more and get your tickets here:

Pantsuit Politics 10th Birthday Celebration

Alise Napp

·

Apr 3

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From A Listener:

I've been listening since almost the very beginning. I can't remember how I came across your podcast but the emergence of Trump within the GOP (and my family's support of him) basically caused whatever bare threads of the connections I had between the faith I was raised in and my political views to finally tear apart. I was desperate for anything I could find that would give me any kind of thread I could use to mend those two things back together into some kind of new fabric. On the faith side, I found writers like Rachel Held Evans and Steve Enns and I found the two of you to help me process the world of politics. In many ways it felt like I had to start from scratch in really figuring out what I believed and why—and your podcast has really helped me do that. And it's the two of you together that really make the podcast special. You are my political yin and yang. Sarah seems to reflect all my desires to cry or let my emotions go and get things off my chest while Beth's deep breaths and love of breaking things down analytically inspire me to do the same. And then you wrap that all up with humor, a genuine love and respect for the community you've created, and a willingness to not always take things so seriously. I'm so grateful for the hard work of the entire team and for being part of the community. But it's getting late....time to go put on my FAFO is a two-way street t-shirt, read some Louise Penny, and dream of Paris while I sleep.

Topics Discussed

• The Biggest News Stories of 2015: Terror, Shootings, and the Rise of Donald Trump

• Starting of Our Work in 2015

• Outside of Politics: Cultural Highlights of 2015

Episode Resources

• Our PREMIERE episode! (Pantsuit Politics)

• Mizzou, Yale, and activism on college campuses (Pantsuit Politics)

• Conflict Is Not Abuse | Arsenal Pulp Press

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:08] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:10] And this is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:12] You're listening to Flashback 2015, a very special episode of Pantsuit Politics. We may have mentioned this once or twice, but we are celebrating 10 years of Pantsuit Politics. And one way we've decided to mark this major milestone is by taking time to reflect on each of the 10 years that we've been podcasting, beginning with 2015.

Beth [00:00:36] It just so happens that our 10-year anniversary coincides with Donald Trump's entry into the political scene. So these past 10 years have really been seminal in American politics. We wanted to go back, painful as it sometimes is, and think about what we were seeing, what we missed, and what we can learn from these 10 years that we've been processing the news together. So that's what we're here to do today.

Sarah [00:01:01] Now, another way we are marking this major milestone is with our live show in Cincinnati on July 19th. It's sold out, but we did want to take a moment to thank Fearless Finance for being a sponsor. They are a woman-owned and listener-owned financial planning firm that my family uses. They are incredible. There's no strings, no sales, no commissions. You just get the advice you need with no judgment. Pantsuit Politics listeners get $50 off their first planning meeting with the code Pantsuit, so check them out. And, of course, just because the live show is sold out doesn't mean the virtual show is unavailable to you. You can still get tickets to that, that you can watch and participate live from wherever you are, or watch it later at your convenience. All right, next up, let's talk about 2015. Beth, I was so struck while looking back at 2015. What a violent year it was. It was just an extraordinarily violent year here in America and around the world.

Beth [00:02:18] It's hard to put that in context too, because now that we have two really live wars, you could say the same about 2025, but the randomness of terror attacks in particular is a different kind of violence, and it wears on you in a different way, psychically. So I think that we were in a really different space in 2015, particularly because of the attack in San Bernardino.

Sarah [00:02:44] Yeah, and globally I think the top story was absolutely the terror attacks in Paris. You had the Charlie Hebdo massacre on January and then November 13th when everybody was there for the Paris Climate Accords, you had these massive attacks that killed 130 people. And I think it was something about them being in France that's seen as this sort of bastion of safety. You had all these Islamic State terrorist attacks, including San Bernardino, where it felt like it was on our shores as well. Then, to me, the chaos of the attacks reaching out into other areas in combination with people fleeing Syria because of the civil war, you had this massive refugee crisis in Europe. So it was just this sense that it was bleeding literally and figuratively out and it was no longer contained and it was heartbreaking. One of the first things we always talk about, always talk about in the formation of Pantsuit Politics, is one of the very first posts you and I were in conversation with on my blog was about the Syrian civil war. And was there a red line? Had they crossed it? Chemical weapons, all these people just fleeing for their lives. And, of course, that heartbreaking photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, face down on the beach. I remember that. I can pull up that image in a moment's notice. All of that just felt so heartbreaking. It felt really, really heartbreaking.

Beth [00:04:17] Syria has definitely been a backdrop to everything that we've done over the past 10 years because we have so wrestled with what America's role is in the world through the lens of Syria. It also has felt so intractable. So to be talking about it now when there has been real change there but it's tumultuous change, it's fragile change, it's imperfect to be sure, it's just strange. It's kind of strange and surreal to look back and see that at the very beginning of our work together, we were watching this shift of people out of Syria that would also change the way we talk about immigration going forward globally. That there would be this global backlash to movement around the world from people fleeing really desperate situations.

Sarah [00:05:07] Yeah, I think my limited vision at the time was based on the fact that generationally, I'm a child of 9/11. And I wasn't fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. And even though those wars affected me and were continuing obviously still in 2015, it still felt like something that was out there. I don't think I was fully, because it wasn't impacting my day-to-day life beyond the headlines, really grappling with how this was going to affect our politics and our views of each other and the world. It still feels like something, even with San Bernardino, like terrorism was something they handled over in the Department of Homeland Security. But it was not something that really was going to be a calculus I needed to make in my politics. Does that make sense?

Beth [00:06:11] It does and it almost like heartbreakingly to me proves out what terrorists’ desire which is that it's not just the violence; it's what the violence changes in people, and the way that the violence has all of these ripple effects. And it's not even just that you're afraid of more violence. It's not even just the randomness that that kind of violence creates, but it is that it rewires us and it causes us to rethink political principles or values that we thought we held onto pretty strongly. The world has taken a real turn from where we were when we were first seeing thousands of people fleeing Syria.

Sarah [00:07:00] Well, and I think that's what you see in our domestic politics as well this year in 2015 because we had two other sources of violence and upheaval that I think I saw through the lens of, well, we'll just keep applying the status quo and chipping away at these. And maybe we need some sort of cultural reckonings, but this is how we always deal with this and we'll continue to deal with police violence or mass shootings in the same way. Because that's what was going on domestically, I think in this year. We had killings by police officers, Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, both in April. This was coming on the hills previously of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 of killing Trayvon Martin, the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Gardner. So we had Black Lives Matter, and then we just continued to have these murders in combination with the shooting at Emmanuel AME in Charleston, which was just horrific. So I think you put those two things together, then you have this other source of rot and festering that was forcing itself into our consciousness this year.

Beth [00:08:34] I will never forget the shooting at Emmanuel AME because I learned about it about two hours after I'd given birth to Ellen. And I remember what it felt like in the hospital to pick up my phone and see that right after I had had a baby. And it was just a profoundly sad thing to think about bringing new life into a world where life can so quickly be taken. And for what?

Sarah [00:09:06] Well, and we also had what feels like a huge number of mass shootings that year. Oregon, Chattanooga, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino. I think there were 57 mass shootings in 2015. And when you go back and look at our episodes, it's like one after the other after the others. We're starting off with another mass shooting, another mass shoot. But sadly, again, this is another place where I wasn't expecting any disruption to the status quo. We'd already had Sandy Hook. And it felt like if that doesn't change anything, nothing will change anything. At least not the change we want. The change we want with something like dramatic overhaul of gun control legislation. And so I think all of these things, like the shootings, the mass shootings, the terrorist attack, I was just trying to force them into a rubric. They were like big heavy books I was trying to squeeze into a bookshelf. You know what I mean?

Beth [00:10:15] Well, that's coping. I think that's the benefit of going back to look later and think through even recent history when maybe you're not coping quite as much. Although there are many aspects of things that happened in 2015 that I think we are still very much in the coping process with, it is helpful to just have a little bit of distance from it. Because how could you have stepped back at the time and would it have been appropriate at the to say, huh, I wonder what this will do to the voting public? I wonder what issues this will make salient for purposes of future elections or future legislation. I think there was just so much to be sad about and it was appropriate to be sad.

Sarah [00:11:01] There were some reasons to celebrate. Now we didn't get to celebrate them on the show because a lot of them happened before we started recording in November, but we did get Obergefell versus Hodges, the US Supreme Court ruling that legalizing same sex marriage in all 50 states on June 26th. I thought this was sooner. In my mind, Bate Griffin was like a little bitty baby when that came across the television screen. Some of this revisiting of the past will remind you how fickle memory is. But we had that, we had diplomatic relations restored between US and Cuba. We did have the Paris climate agreements adoption by 195 countries. But even as I look at the list of positives, it feels like these like-- I don't want to say the legalization of same sex marriage was small, but it was like the final piece of the puzzle and a long battle where we've made enormous strides. Do you know what I mean? It didn't feel revolutionary. It felt like finally. And so I wonder, as I look back, I'm like, yeah, we were having all this upheaval and all this violence, but we weren't having revolutionary positive change. And what's always in my mind as we're reviewing these years, is how the opioid crisis is bubbling in the background and then it'll turn into the fentanyl crisis. And so I'm just trying to think about those things too. Like there's slow burns going on underneath all this and there's nothing that I see when I look back that's like actual relief, as actually putting any water on the flames.

Beth [00:12:39] I don't know. I think Obergefell did feel revolutionary for some people. I think for me I probably experienced it as you did. Like obviously this is where we should be. It's about time. But I wasn't waiting to get married. And if I had been, I think I would have experienced that as a really revolutionary moment. And then certainly we had a revolutionary reaction to it. We're still seeing people pushing to try to get the Supreme court to revisit that decision. And I think it is one block that you can kind of put in the wall of at least why evangelicals supported Donald Trump in a way that was shocking to me at the time. I look back at some of this and think, perhaps that should have been less shocking if I had been interpreting these issues differently. If I have been thinking about how folks who view the world very differently than I do were seeing them, maybe I would have been less surprised by the coalition that he was able to assemble.

Sarah [00:13:36] I was just very much in an Obama framework. That's the truth. We're talking about eight years and Hamilton is building steam 2015. I feel like it really peaks in 2016, but it's building steam and the vibe was we're on this slow march to progress, right? We're just going to keep moving forward where we know who we are. We know we're going to have this pluralistic progressive nation demographics are on our side. So there might be some misfits on the side trying to get attention or trying to complain about progress, but we know where we're headed. That's how I felt about everything that's why even when there was violence or terror staring us right in the face I had the sense that well the adults are in charge and they'll just keep chipping away at this

Beth [00:14:29] I think that's true and incomplete because this is the year we decided to start this podcast. We could feel something happening. We could feel, especially on social media, that a change was occurring in the way people were reacting to news. And we could sense hyperbole building. We could sense fear kind of taking hold. We could since an edge creeping up that we wanted to be part of softening in some way, which feels, I don't know, a lot of ways looking back. It feels a lot of ways of looking back. But I think you're right that in some senses there was this optimism about the future but it was a shaky optimism.

Sarah [00:15:15] Well, let's talk about that. Up next, we want to talk about specific episodes that hit us as we returned to the year 2015. Beth, the episode I found hardest to listen to was our first episode. We clearly, I guess, had some thoughts about what type of conversation we wanted to see. I think if I really-- again, memory is fickle. If I really think back, I was frustrated that the complex conversations were missing from the media and I was rolling my eyes at what was happening on Facebook, but I still was siloing that. You know what I mean? That was just still a place I thought we could just really chip away at. You listen to our first episode and, oh my God, it's so painful. We're blowing off Matt Bevin's race for the governorship of Kentucky and I'm going to play a little minute of our conversation from the first episode.

Audio playback: Beth [00:16:24] This is an interesting one. It seems that Bevin is at the time of our recording down a little bit in the polls and the GOP is throwing a lot of money into the state to try to pull this one out, but I'm not sure that's going to happen.

Audio playback: Sarah [00:16:38] I don't think it's going to happen. Jack Conway is, I think, finally going to get picked for the dance after an unfortunate run against Mitch McConnell. And then I always felt bad for him because I felt like the Allison-Mitch face-off got so much more news and attention and she was the darling of that race, even though she didn't win. I didn't feel like he got the same attention. So I'm glad that he seems to have finally gotten picked. Well, it's not over yet, but I was actually at a rally today for him in Paducah and somebody said, "Hey, Gov," and he said, "Don't call me that, it's not over yet."

Audio playback: Beth [00:17:16] Yeah, and on the Republican side, this has been a weird one. I think [crosstalk].

Audio playback: Sarah [00:17:21] I did not think Matt Bevin was going to win the primary. I thought Comer was going win the primary.

Audio playback: Beth [00:17:25] I thought Comer was going to win the primary, too. I think a lot of the state thought Comer was going to win in the primary. And things just got really strange in the primary race. And here we are with Matt Bevin, who is a tea party conservative, took some really strong conservative positions. I would call them maybe fringe positions in a lot of ways during the primary, and I think that this might be another lesson in don't win the primarily at the expense of the general.

Audio playback: Sarah [00:17:54] Yeah. And I think he just is a interesting guy. The way he was angry in the primary debates, calling people liars. Now he's angry in the main debate calling Jack Conway liar. He does not hesitate to really call people liars. This is the trend I've noticed among his debate performances. He pulls that up pretty fast. You're a liar.

Audio playback: Beth [00:18:16] I think Matt Bevin is a particularly aggressive guy and Jack Conway a particularly, I don't know, narcissistic guy or something. I'm sure that he was much more upset about Alison than you.

Audio playback: Sarah [00:18:29] Well, we'll be kind. We'll say polished.

Audio playback: Beth [00:18:30] I don't know. I don’t find him to be a very appealing candidate. I thought that Rand Paul had his lunch a couple of times when they faced off. It's an interesting race. And I think one where a lot of Kentuckians are going to sit back and think we got to have more candidates the next cycle.

Audio playback: Sarah [00:18:53] Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think a lot of Kentuckians are going to sit back. I think you're going to see incredibly low voter turnout. They already have among the absentee ballots.

Audio playback: Beth [00:19:01] Which is such a shame, because it's a really important time for the state. I mean, we've got a fiscal crisis on our hands. This is not one to sit home on, but I do think people are generally dissatisfied with these two candidates.

Sarah [00:19:14] I listened to that and I thought, "Why didn't we take him winning the primary more seriously?" Why didn't we think, well, he won the primary, something is appealing. And Jack Conway has lost a statewide office before. Why do we think he'd win this one? And all the warnings about Donald Trump were present in Matt Bevin's win. That's the piece I look back and think I should have taken this more seriously.

Beth [00:19:41] If you do not know about this piece of Kentucky history, Matt Bevin was a businessman who ran for governor in Kentucky with the sharpest elbows. And my dad said about Matt Beven, before he said this about Donald Trump, that he came with a chainsaw where a scalpel was needed. And he seemed so crass in a state where our politics were bare knuckle under the surface, but genteel writing over it, that it seemed impossible that he would win. And it is so frustrating to me to have missed this because I thought at the time that Jack Conway was very unimpressive. And I think we talked about in a debate that he doesn't perform well. He doesn't have very much charisma. He seems wishy washy at best on a lot of topics. I knew it's so painful to see this and to see where I have repeated this mistake over and over, where I knew the alternative was not great, but I figured that Bevin and then Trump were bad enough that we would swallow the alternative. And that's just not how it's played out.

Sarah [00:20:57] Yeah, this is what's so frustrating to me. It is so hard because you just keep thinking everyone's going to wake up. Even though we're naming exactly what we know to be true, which is still to be truth. Which is once Donald Trump became the Republican nominee that was enough for people. Once Matt Bevin became the Republican Nominee, that was enough for people. Once that label was placed on, that was it. There's the famous study that they talk about that we don't have a bipartisan system anymore; we have a partisan system. The only check is from the ruling party. That's what I think I was too slow to capture. I got that the voter was very tightly tied to partisanship. And I think that's why we started the podcast. We were trying to scratch at that and get at that and say, can't there be more to us than the label? Because once it's just the label, then we can slap it on anybody and that's a problem. But I don't think I fully saw or appreciated that the opposing party was no longer a check, almost at all. That it had to come from within the Republican party, any sort of breaks, any sort moderation, any sort calibration and it just wasn't and still isn't to us at a large extent. I think that's the part that was hard for me to see because generationally I'd just been in a bipartisan environment where the opposing party was usually the Republican party and they were very powerful at slowing things down and acting as a check. And so that's what I look back and I think, man, that was the piece. I think I understood that the voter cared only about the partisan label, but I wasn't seeing how that was playing out institutionally.

Beth [00:22:52] And I definitely did not understand how important a contrast between the two parties was to voters. Because I was a Republican when we started and said this is Beth from the right at the beginning of every episode because I surrounded by people on the right who were a lot like me, who were very open to compromise, who would have said we value bipartisanship, we need to look for common sense solutions that work for everyone. And it was shocking to me when we started this show and I immediately started getting hate mail from Republicans who absolutely did not want bipartisanship. Who wanted a strong contrast, who wanted me to push back against everything that you were saying, had no interest in any kind of reconciliation with Democrats whatsoever. And I think that I also did not understand the desperation within the Republican party, not voters, but the party apparatus that resulted from Mitt Romney losing to President Obama. And there's this autopsy that comes out that essentially tells the party you need to move in the direction of Democrats. You need to be more progressive; you need be more inclusive and welcoming. You need to be on board with all these things that are driving the voters to say, "Absolutely not, I hate all of that, I don't want any of it." And so there was a different level, I think, of tension building there that I just couldn't see. If I could have seen it, I probably would have disassociated myself with that from the right a lot sooner, because that wasn't how I was feeling at all. That was absolutely there and present in my inbox all the time, and I just didn't want to believe that that many people felt that way.

Sarah [00:24:46] In some ways, the feedback from the audience, I didn't get that in my inbox, obviously, because I was there from the left. And so, when you have people emailing you saying, "I feel the same way, I see it the same way," which is a lot of the experience we had early in the podcast. Obviously, people liked what we were saying, that's why they kept listening. Which I think back on and I wonder where we just created another type of silo, where we just created another space where people could say, no, people will wake up and we'll see it. And that's why with the second term I've tried to be really, really clear-eyed about what I missed, but it's still an exercise on humility to go and listen to these previous years. That's for sure. What episode really struck you?

Beth [00:25:37] It was our third episode. We talked about protests at Mizzou and at Yale and activism on college campuses. And I looked back at this and I was kind of thinking to myself, would we have covered this today? So if there were a big story right now about Halloween on college campus, would we cover this today? Maybe not. I listened back to this episode and think this is what was driving a lot of that undercurrent. So the controversy at the time was about cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes. There was an email from a spouse of a Yale faculty member suggesting that we had gone too far and that students are allowed to be a little obnoxious or a little inappropriate. And that's part of speech on campus and it's part of learning and growing as a person.

Sarah [00:26:32] And wasn't she like an RA adjacent position in one of the houses?

Beth [00:26:36] Yes.

Sarah [00:26:36] Yeah. Okay, it's all coming back to me now.

Beth [00:26:38] Yes, and students were outraged by her email and it became a national conversation where more conservative leaning people were very defensive of her and more progressive people thought that she was completely in the wrong and sort of serving oppressive systems. And you and I were kind of in the middle as I listened back. And I actually thought I think this holds with how we would see this today for the most part. Well, let's play a little clip. I'm curious how this strikes you as you look back at that episode.

Audio playback: Sarah [00:27:13] I just know I think that they felt-- which is the common theme with the next story we're going to talk about, Yale, which the students felt like they weren't listened to. That the African American and minority students felt like they were being ignored.

Audio playback: Beth [00:27:26] Well, and of course, Missouri just has a lot of baggage around racial issues and particularly in the past year. So it's a sad situation, and I think it illustrates how problematic (and we'll get into this more) it is when the rest of the country has this window into what's happening on campuses, but it's tiny and dark window. It's really hard for us to get a full picture and fairly assess the situation.

Sarah [00:27:57] I don't know, I feel like my views on colleges has really evolved. I think I was defensive of the students and now I'm more like, no, there needs to be leadership from the campus in conversation with the students. Because this wasn't happening in a vacuum. It felt like every month there was somebody that was like not appropriately progressive who was getting booed or spit on or kicked off of a college campus and it had become really a siren. I really feel like it was a flashing red flag where people felt like there was not a marketplace of ideas on college campuses, but that there was real silencing. To the point where you get to a Yale now where 95% of the people are self-identified as liberal and still you have like 70% of people saying, "I don't feel comfortable stating my ideas in class." So we've gotten way out of whack here. And I feel like what this woman said was not offensive. It was a debate and it just became you're attacking me. I don't know what year I read conflict is not abuse, but that's where I really started to shift my perspective on this for sure.

Beth [00:29:35] What I think I did not take seriously enough at this time was how unacceptable it was going to be to the average person to have anyone comment on their Halloween costume.

Sarah [00:29:46] Right.

Beth [00:29:47] I did not recognize that we were pushing into spaces that did affect people's daily lives and affected their fun and affected the place where they blow off steam and where we play a little bit. And there are fewer and fewer of those spaces. And I did not take seriously that people started to feel policed everywhere because I agreed with the intention of the policing. When I listen back to this episode, we're both talking about how difficult race is as a source of tension throughout the history of the country. And with good intentions, we want to help be a part of the solution to that, rectify it. We don't want to be hurtful in what we wear or how we speak or the words that we use. And I just did not get that that intention was not enough. And was not broadly enough agreed on, and was not broadly enough agreed on in a way that everything would feel equally meaningful. There was this focus on Halloween costumes seemed bizarre as a mechanism for racial healing to people who weren't on college campuses engaged in this kind of discussion all the time. And I think I just missed that.

Sarah [00:31:12] Well, I don't think I put the pieces together with what we talked about as the top news stories. If you have men being gunned down by police officers and the Black Lives Matter movement and Dylann Roof at this church and these horrific stories and then you're telling people the solution is to watch what you wear on Halloween, it's just not going to fly. If you have violence abroad, you have a refugee crisis, which I don't think I ever truly appreciate how upsetting that is to people. I think I tell myself I read the news all the time, it's not upsetting to me. But because I read news all time, I'm desensitized to stories of violence and global conflict. Or I have a lot of background that provides a certain amount of comfort to me. But if you're not completely checked out, but you know there's this scary attack in Paris and then you're seeing these men with body camera footage being gunned down, then you are seeing all of these mass shootings. And then what people are saying is the solution is really the words we use and these softer, like a soft power but for individuals. Like the solution is soft power and people are hearing and seeing hard problems. And it just wasn't aligning, I think, in a way that was intuitive to people.

[00:33:04] It really needed to involve leadership. And in a vacuum, Donald Trump's stepped into it and said, "I see what's really happening and I have a real solution." Now, again, he didn't win the popular vote. I don't want to go back and we're not to 2016 yet, but he did win the Republican primary fair and square. That is a place he got more votes in 2015 and in the beginning of 2016. And especially in the debates, this is where we were having the primary debates in the late 2015, where he would just step on that stage and upend everything and not pretend that the continued presence in Iraq was something everybody thought was handy-dandy, right? Like there was just a lot of ways he stepped up and said to people, like, "I see the problem." He always names the right problem and has the wrong solution. But I think when everyone else maybe has the either the wrong problem or the right problems and a solution that people feel is from Mars, there's a real lane opened up to you.

Beth [00:34:13] Well, and the wrong problem. That's the thing, right? I really think you're naming something important that for a person who is largely dialed out to what's going on at Yale, when what they hear takes the form of this debate over Halloween costumes or similar things, speakers being disinvited to campus, this is part of a trend that was accelerating at the time. That feels like a focus on the wrong problem. And so even if Trump was crass and aggressive and not what we were used to at all on a Republican debate stage, it felt I think like he was at least a force of disruption against people consumed with the wrong things.

Sarah [00:35:05] Well, and I think looking back, particularly the Republican primary and my perception of it as a Democrat and the perception of in progressive spaces, we weren't looking at it as Donald Trump is this extreme solution when regular Republicans are just fine. People were furious at regular Republicans, they were furious that Mitch McConnell, they were furious at Paul Ryan, they were curious at what they had seen as eight years of norm-busting obstruction under Obama. I don't think all of that's unfair. And the rhetorical strategy we'd used was shame. We were just like they don't care, they're racist.

Beth [00:35:56] They're stupid. That came across very clearly.

Sarah [00:35:58] They are hateful. They're bad. It's not like we're going to debate their ideas because they don't deserve for us to debate their ideas because they're evil people. And that trickled up or down know what direction it went to college campuses and to the media. And it's not like we were starting with George H. W. Bush and we went to Trump. That's not what happened, because that would have been a very different situation. And even in George H. W. Bush, with Dukakis, you're seeing some glimmer of this other strategy; the strategy of what was the famous commercial where Dukakis freed the murderer and they use that in a very manipulative way? Like you're already seeing that. So that to me it was like nobody was talking to who was in front of them except for honestly maybe Donald Trump. Like nobody was actually speaking to the audience. They were speaking to the wished for audience or the wished for enemy or people that were already on their side. Nobody was really talking to who was in front of them.

Beth [00:37:06] But the wild thing is that as Democrats we're hating on Republicans and talking about them as so obstructionist. And again, not always unfairly. I still think the Supreme Court obstruction from Mitch McConnell is historically bad.

Sarah [00:37:20] Don't worry, we'll get there.

Beth [00:37:21] We'll go down that way. But as Democrats have that feeling about Republicans, within the Republican party it just feels like loss after loss after lost. We have the Affordable Care Act. What do you mean obstruction? Obama got to do all kinds of things and profoundly changed the culture. Profoundly changed the cultural. And so you have both parties whirling at the other for different reasons. And I do think that what got communicated from that ultimately was Democrats think Republicans are backward and stupid and wanted to press so much harder. They're super mad at us because they didn't get everything they wanted. So there's no compromise available. And meanwhile, within the Republican party, there was, in a way that I just totally missed, this cultural entrenchment. Because I was fine with most of the cultural progress. It was the expansion of executive power, the ACA, that kind of thing, that I was struggling with. But that is not where other Republicans were.

Sarah [00:38:26] That seems like a good place to wrap up 2015.

Beth [00:38:30] To leave 2015.

Sarah [00:38:32] Now we're not going to leave it all together. Up next, we're going to talk about in Outside of Politics some of the cultural trends and cultural moments of 2015. There was plenty to distract us, Beth. It's a good reason we couldn't see everything perfectly clearly. We were too excited that Adele was back.

Beth [00:38:57] Well, fair. Guilty.

Sarah [00:38:58] We were singing Hello on a loop over and over and again. We were watching Making a Murderer. We were debating that stupid, stupid dress.

Beth [00:39:08] Man, the dress, though, was such a hallmark of the time, too. You really were like it is blue. No, it's white and gold. And we were looking to sort ourselves in so many ways. And I feel like the dress is the perfect symbol of 2015.

Sarah [00:39:28] Because I was almost innocent in comparison to some of the viral trends we talked about on the show in subsequent years. The one thing I look back on, and we talked about it, it was one of the very first things we talked about on the show, was the debut of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair. And I think you and I both saw it as of course we would accept transgender people, it was in alignment with our values. There is a very much a vibe of like what's the big deal? And as I look back on it really through the lens of we did not get what we wanted, transgender people are less safe than they were. So there needs to be some really hard questions asked. I look back at this moment and think, did we blow this off? Did we not take people's questions and concerns seriously? And if they ask them, do we roll our eyes? In a way that, again, we thought we were being protective but really opened up lanes for people with not goodwill, without that alignment on moral and ethical acceptance of transgender people really took advantage of.

Beth [00:40:48] I think in my heart I did believe what's the big deal? This is not a huge percentage of the population. Not really asking for anything except to be treated as people, to be recognized, to be able to live their lives. So I just absolutely did not see this coming as something that would seemingly break a lot of political alignment. Because I think that's what's happened. I think this has broken down a lot. When you look at especially demographic trends in voting, I think this issue has broken a lot of patterns and I am shocked by that still. Still today I find that shocking.

Sarah [00:41:32] Well, you know what I think? I don't ever take seriously enough the sports component. Caitlyn Jenner through my eyes was really a--

Beth [00:41:41] Reality star?

Sarah [00:41:42] Yeah, more adjacent to the Kim Kardashian universe. And, to me, that's always been a pretty accepting space where people are like do what you want. And I think it was in some of the same way that I couldn't comprehend or take seriously like OJ Simpson's history in sports. Because it's a very gendered space and a complicated space when it comes to gender, I think that it's hard generationally if you view somebody through one phase of their life and other people view them through another phase of their life, and how does that affect people's perceptions of that person and how they could or could not change? And I think all the time of this conversation on the New York Times, Opinion Podcast, and Ross Douthat says, the promise of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement was it's a small group of people, they were born this way. This is all we're asking for. Love is love. Very relevant as we had this moment in 2015 with the legalization of same sex marriage. And he's like, and what we got was an explosion of people who identified as gay or lesbian, queer, bisexual, and a real pushing on the boundaries of our understanding of relationships with polyamory and all these things that people-- the undercurrent of the debate at the time was we just want this small thing and then it'll be over basically. And I think that's a fair analysis.

[00:43:28] As a person who went from the Southern Baptist Church to weeping when this decision came down from the Supreme Court, the conversation I had with people that I was trying to convince in my own life was very much that. Love is love. They're born this way. Lady Gaga, full extent of it. And hearing him explain it that way, I was sympathetic and had my eyes opened in a way to like he's right. This was hard on people. I think I just assumed that with Caitlyn Jenner. Everybody would come along the same way. This is a small percentage of the population. This isn't really going to change anything. But the truth is it did, and it's pushed hard on our understandings of gender and coming on the heels of gay marriage and where people felt like give them an inch they take a mile for lack of a better Metaphor. I think some of this with Caitlyn Jenner was like tied up in that. You're making it sound like this is like not a big deal, but you said that before and it wasn't true and we feel like it's going to change everything all over again.

Beth [00:44:54] I'm trying to figure out how to say this without sounding like, ugh, but if everybody could be like me the world would be okay. Because I also do wonder if you look back and there had been more of this is not that big of a deal from all sides, if it would have settled in a much happier way for everybody.

Sarah [00:45:15] Absolutely, everything has an equal and opposite reaction, right?

Beth [00:45:19] Yeah. And so I think about the people who were so celebratory knew that there was going to be an equal and opposite reaction of backlash. But then the backlash was so fierce, so extraordinary. We got to this place where people who would have maybe in other contexts said, "Yeah, I think you should settle your disputes locally. Surely we can work out our problems without giant policies," were then advocating for the government to push people out of sports. Like one of the biggest disappointments I have about adults and recognizing that maybe there are no adults, comes from the fact that with a relatively small population, we have not been able to figure the sports thing out on our own. I think as I have tried to really listen and be open-minded and hear from everyone about the sports, that that still is a very fact-specific, sports-specific, level-specific inquiry. But instead, we all just freaked out and made this go from a conversation about how everyone's interest and fairness could be accommodated. Okay, you are concerned about a possible advantage in the relay race. I hear that. I am concerned about adults treating kids as second-class citizens. You can probably hear that, too. And how can we work through that? And instead we just made it so big all the way around. I keep looking back on this with such lament for that.

Sarah [00:47:05] It became a type of Pantsuit Politics lore, or shortcut for me to say over the course of the podcast I learned that people don't really want me to send them an Atlantic article, that the long read is not going to persuade them. But I was still very much in that space at this point in 2015. That I thought if I just calmly explained it and we really had a nice calm conversation, that we could reason people out of their emotional reaction. And in some ways this podcast and particularly the 10 years of Donald Trump on the political scene has taught me you cannot reason people out of their emotional reaction. You have to take their emotional reaction to change, threat, scarcity, whatever it is, very seriously. You have to hear them. You have to make sure they understand you hear them. And no one feels heard when you're telling them just to calm down. Not a toddler, not a three-year-old, not a 16-year-old, not a 70-year-old. No one feels calmed when somebody just tells you, calm down, you're overreacting. And I think that I hear so much of me just trying so hard to reason people out of their emotions.

Beth [00:48:19] I think I also just lacked some life experience to recognize how much people would freak out about things. Because at this point in my life I was still pretty young, pretty close to having graduated from law school. Not inexperienced, but I hadn't yet heard some stories about bad neighbors, and I hadn't yet experienced some real betrayals that would come down the path or people just responding in ways to situations like present palpable situations where I would trust a person and think like, whoa, what is happening here? And all those things probably would have made this more foreseeable to me had I had those life experiences at this point, but I had not.

Sarah [00:49:07] That's probably a good place to end on. It's just talking about where we were in our lives and how much that affected this. We both had new babies. Felix and Ellen came into the world in 2015. This was also about the time, I think, I sat down with the commissioner who told me she wasn't going to run again and decided to run for city commissioner. So we were starting a business. We had new baby. I was about to start to run for office. So we were just in a real beginnings phase. I had two kids. I felt a little more steady on my feet, but I'd also really had the wind knocked out of my cells with the pregnancy loss between Amos and Felix and was really reorienting myself in the world away from my primary identity as mother and was exploring more political identities through Pantsuit Politics and running as a commissioner. So I can hear all of that. I can hear my re-examining and really trying to lean into political expertise and political analysis when really maybe personal reflection would have done. But that was the space I was in. I think I was really starting over. I was really starting over in a lot of ways when we began Pantsuit Politics.

Beth [00:50:29] I was struggling with some cognitive dissonance because I was objectively doing well professionally. I was starting to be invited to rooms that I hadn't been invited to before. I was started to receive some awards. From the outside, it looked like things were going well. It looked like I had made this big, bold career bet to change from practicing law to doing the business side and that that was paying off and it was going great. But internally, I was still very dissatisfied with my career and very married to it. I related so much a few months ago when we were talking about the white lotus to the speech that Carrie Coon made in it where she said that she had tried work as her religion. I think I was still there. I had not yet gone back to church at this point, so a lot of pieces around me felt shaky and disappointing. A lot of places in my life felt like I had done everything I was supposed to do and it looked like it was going great, but I found it very empty. And I can hear that in a lot of my comments early in the podcast, just that struggle between the identities I was trying to inhabit.

Sarah [00:51:54] Well, even though I know how this ends, I'm very excited to check in on 2016 Sarah and Beth and see how these moments changed in 2017, 2018. So we're excited for this little project. We can't wait to hear from all of you. Especially, we want to hear from the people who started listening in 2015, the OGs who've been around the whole time. We can't wait to engage in conversation with this community as we celebrate this milestone. Thank you so much for joining us. We will be back in your ears again soon. And until then, what we've been saying since 2015, keep it nuanced, y'all.