You know, I’ve written in this space numerous times over the years that Trumpism wouldn’t end just because Joe Biden took the helm of American government for four years, but the truth is that I was pretty sure that Trump himself, as opposed to the MAGA shitstorm he conjured into being, was pretty much done. I really didn’t think that Donald would be back. When he did, in fact, romp home the nomination and contend once more for the Presidency, I honestly believed that he’d lose, probably in a squeaker, but after everything he did in his first term, after January 6, surely he’d never be voted back into office. Oh my God, of course not.
Welp.
So that happened.
So much for my last optimistic missive, eh? It turns out the polls were missing something, just not what I thought; so today, I wake up in a world in which Trump, trailing by one to three points for months, not only won the election, but won the popular vote (something he’d never done before), and possibly even crossed the 50% threshold (so far, the count is ongoing). Republicans took the Senate, too, and look good to keep the House – and of course they already own SCOTUS, to which Donald will now have the opportunity to appoint more justices – and to really rub our noses in it, Donald ran the table on the seven crucial swing states, winning them all.
Jesus Christ!! How?
As you might expect, everybody’s got an axe to grind, and an associated explanation.
Bret Stephens, the insufferable prick of a conservative columnist at the NY Times, says it’s all down to the Democrats being “priggish” scolds and too radically woke for the average hard-working American (and anyway, there should have been a convention, rather than a coronation of Kamala), so really it’s about the tyranny of left-wing Democratic culture:
The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.
Really? What Democratic government can you point to, Bret, that has actually done anything legislatively to impose “bizarre cultural norms”? Never mind that; to Bret, this is what the Dems (and not merely a segment of the far left that forms part of the Democratic coalition) are all about:
…The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.
Uh-huh. Let’s leave aside that actually, a lot of them are racists and transphobes, and talk about how strange it is that these marginal issues have come to dominate American political discourse. The thing is, these oh-so-offensive liberal attitudes are generally spurned as well by the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and they had nothing whatever to do with how Biden governed, the legislation he passed, or the rhetoric he employed, and even less to do with how Kamala campaigned. So what gives? If this is really what Trump voters are all worked up about it, might that not, Bret, have something to do with how you, Bill Maher, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, all the trolls on Fox News, and various other aggrieved pantloads on the right keep telling them, over and over, gesticulating wildly and foaming at the mouth, that they’re under cultural siege, and that’s the thing that really matters? And what does it say about Trump’s voters that they put more importance on trivia like the half dozen or so biological transgender males in the whole country who want to play on the girls’ field hockey team than they do on infrastructure, climate change, jobs, and other things that have an actual, measurable impact on their lives? They’d rather let Putin subjugate Ukraine than agree to disagree on the symbolic importance of pronouns? Really? And that’s supposed to strike me as legitimate? I’m supposed to respect that? Harris should have pandered, somehow, to these irrational concerns? How, exactly?
If that’s really the problem, maybe there’s a way to run a successful campaign that still smacks of decency and lays a proper emphasis on sound public policy priorities, but it won’t be easy.
Others are saying no, that’s actually not the problem, it’s about the economy, stupid, just like always. I have my doubts, but there’s something to this. Sure, we’re told, America’s economy under Biden was the envy of the developed world, but there was that nasty bout of post-COVD inflation, and even though that’s now been fully tamed, current prices and interest rates are still making staples like housing and food a lot more expensive than they we’re just a couple of years ago, despite wage gains, low unemployment, and all that other good news that apparently never impressed Main Street. Says David Goldman over at CNN:
By several major metrics, the US economy is on fire, the envy of the rest of the world. But Americans still viewed it unfavorably, and a significant number of voters blame President Joe Biden and Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, for failing to make enough improvements to Americans’ financial situations over the past four years. Poll after poll suggested that Americans hold largely negative views about the US economy.
That’s because economic sentiment doesn’t always match up nicely with data that shows the economy is adding jobs, consumer spending is growing and gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy — continues to boom. When you pay through the nose for a cup of coffee or when you can’t afford to buy a home, those data are meaningless: You feel shut out of the American Dream.
After making that argument, he then lists all the ways that America’s economy is, actually, extremely robust, but what can you do, that’s not what people think. Bernie Sanders made much the same argument in a press release, and honestly, I think he has a point, but also that he is, ultimately, full of shit. Here’s what he had to say:
Yes, wealth inequality, and the shamefully unfair distribution of America’s constant gains in productivity and GDP have left a lot of ordinary citizens feeling ignored, disaffected, and stripped of their status as stakeholders in the society they support. However, to call this the product of Democratic policies and philosophies is, frankly, nuts. This riposte to Bernie’s post is exactly on the mark:
Damned straight. Joe Biden did not abandon working class people, for the love of God. The entirety of his administration’s legislative agenda was aimed at improving the standard of living for the people who just elected Trump. Who do these aggravated white people think stacked the system against them, and let the plutocrats scoop up the spoils of America’s tremendous economic gains over the last half century? Who cut the tax breaks for the billionaires? Who fought to keep health care and pharmaceuticals so ludicrously expensive? Who tried to obliterate Obamacare? Who wants to bring back child labour, gut Social Security and Medicare, crush the unions and remove all legislative and regulatory barriers to the exploitation of workers by capitalist elites? They think any version of the GOP, let alone Trump’s crony capitalist oligarchy, is going to improve their lot? Yes, they want change, but why do they think Trump is the one to deliver it? Why did they believe Biden wasn’t? What does that say about them?
Well, say others, maybe they’d see the light, if only Harris had articulated a compelling vision, but she never gave them anything to vote for, as opposed to against. Nobody knew anything about what sort of policies she’d pursue, did they? This was another argument put forward by our old pal Bret Stephens, and I refuted it with some vigor here:
Obviously, I don’t buy this nonsense for a second. The fact is, polling repeatedly showed that likely Trump voters didn’t know anything about policy, except on immigration, with respect to which they ate up Trump’s narrative that America was being overrun by sub-human criminal brown people pouring over an unguarded frontier with Mexico, while ignoring that Biden eventually signed executive orders that all but shut down the border, and never realizing, apparently, that it was Trump himself who torpedoed the toughest bipartisan immigration and border-control legislation in a generation, after the Dems agreed to let the GOP have everything it wanted if it would get a bill through Congress.
There’s plenty more along these lines that we could discuss – like I say, everybody’s got an explanation – but all this hand-wringing about Democratic missteps and bad messaging rather misses the real issue, and I’m not going to let the voters off the hook for this fiasco. I’m with Tom Nichols of the Atlantic, a curmudgeon after my own heart, (we’re the same age, have similar educational backgrounds, and share a set of views on foreign policy and geopolitics, besides which he’s a cat person like me). He contends that average Americans have driven themselves into some sort of bored, decadent, ignorant rut where they’re up to their necks in misplaced grievance and misinformation. He rejects that the election was about anything substantive at all:
But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.
Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries.
Right.
Somebody tell me how you’re supposed to run against that, because I have no f’ing clue.
Still, for a while to come, liberals like me are going to be debating, endlessly, what the Democrats have to do to communicate more effectively with the folks who voted for Donald, and I suppose that’s good and proper – vital, really, if we suppose, for the moment, that there are going to be more elections in America’s future – but I reject utterly the proposition that, following a spate of agonized soul searching, the Dems need to atone for their political sins and take a good, hard look at themselves and what they stand for. Bullshit. Kamala ran a terrific campaign. Biden’s Presidency was the most successful in living memory, and Kamala’s proposals were popular, at least to those in the small slice of the population that understood them. The incumbents had a record that should have supported a renewed mandate, but the fact is, the Dems were up against it this time, more than we understood. We thought that a majority would reject an adjudicated rapist, convicted felon, and insurrectionist who tried to overturn an election. We thought Donald’s lies were transparent and disgusting enough to disqualify him with large swaths of the electorate. We thought Project 2025 would terrify a huge slice of the voting public. We thought the savage curtailment of reproductive rights would drive enraged women to the polls, and the female vote would rescue us. We thought that the most unpopular running mate in history would drag Donald down. We thought that the Nuremberg Rally he held at Madison Square Garden would leave a sour taste in peoples’ mouths. We thought that America’s world-beating performance in the post-COVID recovery insulated Harris from the fate being suffered by incumbent governments all over the rest of the democratic world, which are toppling like dominoes as stressed populations react to the inflation that rampaged everywhere when a resurgence of demand outstripped what battered supply chains could provide (we here in Canada are about to do the same, and seem poised to install a MAGA-like conservative demagogue named Poilievre as Prime Minister at the next opportunity).
We thought wrong. Americans convinced themselves that their country was headed in the wrong direction. In poll after poll they said so, overwhelmingly, and yes, above all, they griped about economic issues. If we accept that this was really the crucial factor in Kamala’s defeat, then we also have to conclude that the majority didn’t care (or just as likely never understood) that their economy was the best in the world, that inflation had been brought under control, and that joblessness was way down to historic lows while wages were on the way up, out-pacing inflation, all because Biden’s government had pulled every policy lever it could, with considerable success, to promote middle class prosperity and avoid what many economists predicted was an inevitable recession. In this view, they were prepared to put a monster back in the White House because the price of gas and eggs was just too damned high, and nothing else mattered.
I don’t know about that. Like Tom Nichols, I think this goes deeper, and tells us something about the American character that we’d prefer not to believe. Think about all the reasons they shouldn’t have been willing to elect Trump, and all they had to gloss over or throw down the memory hole to think that another Trump administration wasn’t a profoundly bad idea. They didn’t blame Donald for his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic, and the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths that resulted. They ignored his rank corruption. They didn’t seem to think it mattered that he tried to pull off a violent coup d’état and bring an end to over 240 years of constitutional government. They didn’t care about his adultery, his sexual assaults, his tax evasion, or his 34 felony convictions. They ignored his long history of fraud and his habit of stiffing everybody to whom he owes money, including, as a matter of routine, ordinary working people and contractors who provided goods and services to his rickety business empire. They were unperturbed when it turned out he stole truckloads of classified information on his way out the door after losing in 2020, and left it lying around in public spaces and bathrooms at his Florida golf motel. They believed him when he told them the 2020 election was stolen from him, and didn’t care that he was laughed out of court over 50 times trying to press that ludicrous claim. They weren’t put off by his endless, self-pitying whining, or his repeated public vows to use the powers of the Presidency to extract his revenge on everyone who’d crossed him. They excused, or never actually noticed, his close, long-standing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. They didn’t blanch when he started talking about immigrants “poisoning America’s blood”, and mused about turning the military against “the enemies within”. They didn’t even worry about his growing incoherence and incapacity for logical thought. They wanted Donald back. They like how he makes them feel. What does that tell you?
They also, of course, lacked any understanding of fundamental issues, such as how tariffs really work, and what it really means, morally, economically, and logistically, to deport 15 million people, and they swallowed wholesale the anti-woke hysteria being peddled by the likes of Bret Stephens, as well as horrendous lies too ridiculous to dupe anyone with a lick of sense, from Haitians eating household pets, to kids coming home from school having been forced against their will into gender reassignment surgery, to doctors in Blue States performing “post-birth abortions” (i.e., murdering live children after they’ve been delivered). By the tens of millions, they’re almost utterly divorced from reality, buying into the preposterous conspiracy theories and absurd disinformation pumped into their uncritical little minds by the various grifters and charlatans of the right wing ecosphere, as amplified by America’s enemies abroad. Anything that challenges their twisted world view is “fake news”. My God, look at the way so many swallowed the incredible bullshit about FEMA and the federal government’s ability and willingness to cause hurricanes to devastate Red States during hurricane Milton. It was insane. Relief workers and meteorologists were getting death threats. And I’m supposed to believe that Kamala lost because of looney left-wing attitudes around pronouns and transgender athletes being foisted on the decent folk of the sane American middle? Or that it was the price of groceries? That it’s all the fault of the Dems themselves, because they don’t know how to talk to the non-college educated masses, the snooty elitists?
No, Im not letting the voters off the hook for what’s about to happen. From where I sit, the majority of those who voted this time around seem ignorant, cruel, and gullible, prone to magical thinking and incapable of understanding simple things, dangerous traits in a population frightened to death about what they’re being told are existential threats to their birthright, and their very identity as ordinary, right-thinking, salt-of-the-Earth Americans.
With an electorate like the one that poor Kamala tried to win over, it’s not the Dems who need to take a chastened look at themselves. It’s the American people.
Post-script: Oh well, I may be crushed and defeated, but at least I have company! Tom Nichols, true to form, posted this thread a couple of hours after this column went public:
https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1855065708033425451
While never-Trump conservative Bill Kristol had this to say:
This discussion between Tom Nichols and Tim Miller is well worth your time, if you’re a political junkie like me:
the needlefish 