Welcome to Confronting Capitalism, a podcast that looks behind the political events of our day into their historical and political context.

I'm Melissa Nashak, and I'm here with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU, and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

How are you doing, Vivek?

I'm doing very well. Thank you,

Melissa. This week, I was thinking that we dig a little more into the recent presidential

election results in which Donald Trump was victorious over Kamala Harris. I think much to the shock

of Kamala Harris, her campaign and generally mainstream liberals.

You know, when this election happened, I couldn't help thinking that it was some kind of

groundhog day. And we're just back in 2016. How are you feeling about it?

I mean, there's a sense in which we are, but there's also, I think, an element of

predictability to what happened. But it's not just that the outcome was somewhat predictable.

I think the aftermath is different in many ways to the 2016 scene. So I think it'd be good to set it up.

When Hillary Clinton ran against Trump in

2016, literally nobody expected him to win. Nobody. And in fact, the rest of the Republican slate

took him so unsuriously that they really just kind of saw him as a sideshow. And he was able to

accumulate seats and votes

because the conservative, the neo-conne Republican vote was split among so many different

candidates. Whereas in the Democratic Party, they saw the danger of Bernie Sanders much more

quickly and they consolidated against him in a much, much more, I think, self-conscious

and coordinated way. So Trump's victory was unexpected and really in a deep sense, shocking,

because back then he was seen as being very unpopular and everyone thought that Hillary Clinton, even though she was reviled

across the board, would easily beat him. So his coming to power was both a shock to the political

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