I’ve been on Twitter (now X) since June 2008, meaning that I’ve spent 16 years on the platform. And in that time, I have become increasingly, overwhelmingly aware of its tendency to make the most “online” segments of our politics seem the most dominant or urgent — think “tradwives” and “tankies,” constituencies that aren’t very big in the real world but have a large, noisy, fervent presence on the internet, for both right and left.
And while many of the most “online” candidates lose in real-life elections (Blake Masters in the 2022 Arizona Senate race, for one), why they garner so much support in the first place is worth contemplating. What is it about the purity spiral of the online right — partisans playing to the most intense parts of the online base, continually trying to prove their conservative bona fides — that thrives despite real-world losses?
Mary Katharine Ham is a commentator for Fox News who has been very online and immersed in social media politics just as long as I have. So I spoke with her about the online right — its real-world wins and losses and what the point of being an online conservative influencer is in the first place, especially for women.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew.
Jane Coaston: So, you’ve been an online politics person, and an online conservative since, basically, those terms existed. What was it like being an online conservative woman in the pre-Trump era?
Mary Katharine Ham: It’s been a while, because the pre-Trump era is now so long ago. I don’t think I’m a person who has gotten a lot of online hate, in general, throughout my career, so I’m thankful for that. In the pre-Trump era, I did feel like the attacks, even if they were personal, came on ideological lines, so it wasn’t really coming from my own side back then. In the Trump era, I was a Trump-critical conservative at Fox News at various times, and, particularly, when I was at CNN, it made my hate mail so diverse, because everyone had a reason to hate me.
Coaston: I’ve talked to people like Kristan Hawkins from Students for Life, and she’s very upset about nasty stuff she hears from the left, but also the things she sees that are problematic with the way someone like Matt Gaetz talks about pro-choice women. The tether here seems to be not politics, but gender. What has happened to the conservative movement, and how it thinks about women?
Ham: As we say, Twitter is not real life. Being online, you can find your little cloistered group who believes whatever it is, and enjoys whatever snark and whatever vitriol that you’re throwing around, and you can get paid off of those clicks and it can be very enjoyable, and shoot your dopamine up.
It’s in the real world that you have to convince them to vote for you, and in the real world — and I find this with ideological stuff, too — everyone’s a hybrid.
When you’re stuck too much online, you end up taking in all this content that says, “Well, you can either be a tradwife, or you’re a radical feminist in the other direction,” and it’s like, “Well, I don’t know. I work a very flexible job; I have four kids that I do a lot of work with. I have home-schooled them in the past. I’m not that great a cook, but I was just baking cookies with my daughter.” There are so many ways of living in between the two poles that end up getting totally obliterated by this conversation online. And that conversation does not appeal to women in the real world, who are suburban women, who are moms who might be a little left of center, but have some concerns about schools being closed for 18 months.
Coaston: I’d argue that the type of online conservatism encouraged by Twitter and other platforms has not proved to be a winning message for virtually anyone besides Donald Trump, as we’ve seen in 2018 and 2022, and in Colorado with a race for a U.S. House nomination. What does that mean for conservatism writ large?
Ham: I agree. We have an incentive structure that is broken: You can be a combination of loud, brash, mean — and losing. Right? Because all of those things might turn off voters — and that can actually pay. The losing part can be part of the gig. You get more clicks if you’re loud and brash. And then if you lose, by virtue of not appealing to the voters you need to appeal to, you can just say, “Well, I was just too pure and conservative for the people to accept,” or, “The establishment turned against me, because of these things, and, therefore, the loss itself is yet another metric of my purity.”
That can put a state party into a dive that’s really hard to get out of, because, understandably, those on the right keep getting more and more frustrated with not winning, and sometimes that means that the more reasonable folks, or the more center-right folks, will filter themselves out. You see this in Colorado, and you did see it in Virginia before Glenn Youngkin won there.
I have a friend who is a center-right, libertarian-ish woman in Colorado, and she left Colorado politics a handful of years ago almost entirely. She ended up running a mini-goat farm. But then there was a turn in Colorado with this latest defeat of the G.O.P. chair in the primary by a more traditional movement conservative guy.
Coaston: Right. The Trump-backed chairman of the Colorado G.O.P., Dave Williams, who had a full anti-Pride campaign that used the phrase, “God hates flags.”
[It most likely was an allusion to the extremist group Westboro Baptist Church’s display of signs that used a similar phrase with a slur. Michelle Goldberg recently wrote more about this primary and Mr. Williams’s campaign.]
Ham: My friend Kelly Maher, who became the goat farmer, Williams ticked her off so much that she jumped back in, and did outside money for this race and wanted to go after this guy for spending the G.O.P.’s money on his own race. She’s been online for as long as I have too, and we’re always wrestling with, “Well, is this worth doing anymore? Is it worth being a voice that’s slightly different on these things?”
Coaston: On a large scale, in much of Europe, in Asia and in North America, young women, in general, tend to be more liberal than men, which is a comparatively new phenomenon. That’s not what we saw in the early 1990s. In your view, why do you think that is?
Ham: That’s a million-dollar question. Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote a book in 2015 called “The Selfie Vote,” and it’s about the millennials who are still considered young. It used to be that you’d maybe come out of college, or even out of high school, get married, have kids and because of those milestones in your life, you would approach public policy differently. Tax policy would look different to you, child care would look different to you, and perhaps you would end up being a more centrist, or a right-leaning voter, despite being liberal when you were young.
That was an arc that a lot of people traveled. Well, if that arc doesn’t begin, these days, until your late 20s, early 30s, and if fewer people are getting married, and if fewer people are buying property, because it’s sometimes out of your reach, and fewer people are having as many children, then the party, and so right-wing people, can’t count on that arc turning people into conservatives.
I think a lot of issues are left on the table where women are not spoken to — again, the field is ceded to the left and then those voting patterns are locked in. And, understandably, if you have a particular leader of the party like Donald Trump, who has a character that isn’t necessarily appealing to women, particularly suburban moms, you’re going to end up solidifying those as Democratic votes.
Now the weird thing about Trump is that in other areas, with Hispanic voters, sometimes with Black voters, sometimes with voters in cities that you wouldn’t expect, he’s made inroads that people like me would never have expected, so I have to recognize my own limitations in figuring out how to do this stuff.
Coaston: I would also say that we see, among Black men versus Black women, a massive gender gap. I remember looking at the exit polls from 2016, and 1 percent of Black women in Pennsylvania voted for Trump, which I believe is a number you could probably fit in a decent-size bedroom.
Ham: Right.
Coaston: It seems to me that there are a lot of forces colliding within conservatism, and even using the word “conservatism” feels limiting. There’s the old guard, the so-called new right, and a bunch of people I’d argue aren’t conservative so much as they are anti-left. Where do you think that leaves everyday conservative voters, who aren’t online all the time?
Ham: Look, I have never been a Trump fan, partly because his policy preferences, — let’s just take the most recent one, tariffs at 10 percent — do not appeal to my economic-conservative take.
There’s a lot of things he believes, and enacts, that I don’t care for as a conservative. Because he became the candidate for the Republican Party, there will be no accountability for what happened during Covid, because he was in the sort of heavy-handedness of government restrictions of civil liberties during that time.
However, I do have to recognize, and this is where I differ from many of my anti-Trump friends, the party and the voters are just saying that they want something different. They want something different than I offer. Whether it’s in style, whether it’s in policy. It doesn’t mean that I have to stop believing those things.
But I do have to confront the fact that voters are saying they want a different flavor, and they’ve been saying that for a long time, and it can be more populist on both sides.
[In 2023, I interviewed Ms. Ham for “The Ezra Klein Show,” in which we discussed how her expectation going into the 2022 election was that Democrats would be punished for their policies on Covid, but they weren’t. Ms. Ham told me, “This is one thing where I copped to caring deeply about this and, therefore, possibly over-reading it.”]
Coaston: I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this, because I’ve been, increasingly, thinking about how there’s a very large constituency of people who think of themselves as being Republicans, but they’re not populist, they’re, “You can’t tell me what to do”-ist, which I think it’s a general American sentiment.
You see the social conservatives trying to make inroads, and yet the social conservatives are trying to tell people, essentially, what to do, and they’re being responded to by someone like Barstool Sports basically saying, “No. You’re not going to tell us what to do about anything that we want to do.” What does that conflict look like? Where does it go? Conservatives can’t really be the cool mom that says you can do whatever you want —
Ham: But also neither can liberals, at this point, right? There’s a very puritan streak to much of liberal policy.
But, to your question, I would say that a bunch of people in the center-right, Republican-leaning, “You can’t tell me what to do”-ist categories, they are sometimes just reacting against the left. I think one of the principal things they’re reacting against is the idea that America is this bad force, that it is not a force for good in the world, that it comes from this irrevocably broken beginning. And its original sin is not capable of being redeemed. Slavery is what I’m referring to, obviously.
I think a lot of people reacting to that, they look at the left, and they think, “Well, that’s not where I belong. I’m a bit of a flag-waver. I like to stand for the Pledge. Love the military.” They feel like they don’t fit there. So, that’s one thing.
Two, I think we’re in an arms race of people telling each other what to do. One of the things that I find difficult about arguing for a more libertarian position on many issues and a more, “Leave us the hell alone” position is that I think more populist right-leaning people argue, not incorrectly, that the left will ratchet up on school policy, on curriculum, and if you don’t fill the gap with your own values, you will be overtaken.
I think Trump was a desire to fight that tendency. Like, “We’re not laying down for this.”
Coaston: There has been the rise of what we could now call conservative influencers. These are not people who are pundits or writers necessarily, but they’re influencers. You talked a little bit about the click incentive. What do you think those influencers are attempting to influence young people to do?
Ham: Well, I think that’s the issue with a lot of politics right now. Even with politicians, themselves: Are you actually attempting to influence people to vote for you, to believe in a policy, to do whatever it is — or are you an influencer in this new influencer economy? Which I can’t hate on people for wanting to do it. It can be a very sweet gig. I would say that parts of my career are, certainly, influencer-y. It’s fun to connect with an audience, and it’s fun to see comments, and get feedback, and all those things, so I don’t hate on this new economy we’re creating, per se, but I do think there’s a real question of what it incentivizes, and what you’re attempting to influence.
Again, one of the things about the conservatism that I came up in, and how it was connected to the Republican Party versus now is when Trump was elected, that ideological people needed to realize — and this is something that I have always been bad at — is recognizing that regular people are not that ideological. A lot of voters don’t think that way.
But in the end, what does that translate into? I’m not sure if there’s no policy structure, if there’s no ask. I guess it could be as simple as get out the vote stuff. Rock the Vote was, arguably, an influencer campaign before we had influencers. But I think it’s very unclear what anyone is trying to accomplish. The metric ends up being, in the case of skin-care girlies, “Am I selling? Am I moving product?” And for right-leaning folks, like, “I don’t know. What are we moving? Are we gathering donations?”
The post ‘Regular People Are Not That Ideological. A Lot of Voters Don’t Think That Way.’ appeared first on New York Times.
