Someone handed President Barack Obama a basketball last Saturday after a Joe Biden campaign event in Michigan. He coolly sank a three-point shot from the corner. That’s not something you just pull out of your back pocket. It takes conditioning, practice, and skills. The man’s got game.
Democrats cannot expect their committees in rural counties to sink three-pointers for their candidates after a one-hour training once every four years. But that’s how they campaign and how they lose local and statewide elections. They run up huge vote leads in a few, well-organized urban areas during early voting, then watch in horror on Election Day as Republicans in dozens of small rural counties eat their lunch.
The most interminable presidential election since 2000 is still pending final vote counting this morning. When Joe Biden prevails as expected, Never Trumper Tom Nichols will be relieved. So will quite a few more of us. Max Boot writes, “I have never been more grateful for President Trump’s incompetence. He can’t even organize a coup d’état properly.”
Nichols writes:
But no matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.
That is what scares him and the rest of us, Nichols explains. As a conservative, he did not expect the Biden landslide the polls suggested.
… I know my former tribe. Trump voters don’t care about policy. They didn’t care about it in 2016, and they don’t care about it now. The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.
It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power.
The expected Biden win feels more like a stay of execution than a victory for this creaky republic.
Both major parties are likely to take the wrong lessons from this election, Nichols fears. Republicans may conclude that more authoritarian, more racist candidates and politics will keep them in power. Republicans next time could “replace the childish and whiny Trump with someone who projects even more authoritarian determination.” Democrats driven by an ascendant progressive wing may believe “moving left, including more talk of socialism and more social-justice activism is just the tonic they’ll need to shore up their coalition.”
Nichols’s assessment is correct. The party of Trump does not care about policy. It does not care about character. It holds no principle sacred save might makes right. We are in grave danger.
But I disagree with some progressive colleagues about how to defeat Trumpism. Many blame party elders’ reflexive centrism for Democrats’ inability to convert abstract popular support for progressive policies into legislative wins and governing majorities. I maintain that oppositely charged political ideology alone will not neutralize Trumpism.
Thirty years of conservative talk radio and 24-hour cable news turned politics across a large swath of the country into sports entertainment and prepared the ground for Trumpism. A deeply damaged man, Trump is not a politician. He is an entertainer. He once “owned” a piece of the World Wrestling Federation. He sells what red America is buying. Supporters follow his rallies like fans follow rock bands. Trumpers come not for policies but for the show. They come to be told their place atop the social order is safe from encroachment by Others. They come to see Trump smack down their enemies.
Donald Trump won largely on celebrity and perceived “charisma.” (There’s no accounting for taste.) But he had help in rural America of those thirty years of conservative talk doing Republicans’ organizing for them. It is certainly not because Republicans there are better organized.
Barack Obama won in 2008 not on being as progressive as progressives could wish. He too won on having the charisma to inspire an army of voters and volunteers. (He needed them to carry out a solid campaign plan.) Joe Biden had Donald Trump and COVID-19. But finding candidates with Obama-level charisma is a game of chance. Better to be good than lucky.
Politics in the abstract may be a contest of ideas. Politics on the ground is a contest of skills. The highest turnout in 120 years did not give Democrats the sweeping repudiation of Trump they desired. Belief that more-progressive candidates would give whichever leftover Democrats and independents did not turn out in this election the extra jolt to turn out in the next is misplaced.
Neglected Democratic committees in rural counties from coast to coast need basic skills comparable to Obama’s in basketball. Time after time, Republicans out there devour vote leads Democratic campaigns run up in densely blue cities. We cannot defeat the looming threat to the republic with raw enthusiasm and leftier policies no matter how popular polls show they are. If this election proved nothing else, it is that believing polls is a fool’s game.
The Democratic Party virtually disappears between elections in redder, rural areas. In election after election, Democrats expect well-financed, top-of-ticket candidates to parachute in expertise every couple of years. But that’s primarily into cities in swing states where lie the largest blocks of blue votes. The day after the election, that expertise parachutes out again leaving behind little except leftover office supplies.
Democrats need instead to develop native skills in smaller counties for winning rural victories or at least for shaving rural Republicans’ margins enough to protect Democrats’ urban ones. Gov. Howard Dean got that. If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit. And if you do show up to play, you’d better have game.
Right thinking alone won’t defeat Trumpism. One might as well show up at the Olympics with no conditioning and no skills and expect to compete on enthusiasm and good thoughts. Try sinking a three-pointer from the corner with just those.
