Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Planting a flag in red America

If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit. Step into many fast food joints in rural America and the TV is likely tuned to Fox News. Drive across rural America east and west and radio is dominated by RW talk. Democrats have let this situation stand for years without responding. Will they this time?

Ryan Cooper argues that so-called “liberal media” was in the tank for Donald Trump. A lot of factors contributed to Donald Trump’s win, he writes:

But the information environment—the combination of traditional journalism, social media, party propaganda, and so on—is preposterously biased and inadequate. Trump brushed aside any of about a thousand scandals that would have sunk any previous politician. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at what their information strategy should be, and more importantly, how their messaging can be reliably and consistently put in front of voters.

Cooper recommends that “Democrats need a party publication—something to bypass the traditional media and deliver progressive messaging directly.”

Fine idea. Not going to happen. The underlying assumption is that RW outlets like Fox News, OAN, and all those other RW propaganda vehicles are arms of the Republican Party. They are not. The GOP doesn’t have the money to support them any more than Democrats do. They may be owned and operated by deep-pocketed Republicans, but are not party operations.

Cooper wants to see the left abandon mainstream outlets to build their own information ecosystem:

Websites, radio stations, podcasts, and so forth ought to be stood up by party members with access to money—the Harris campaign and associated groups, by the way, spent about $5 billion losing this election—particularly if they can replace genuine local news that has been gutted by private equity and Facebook, or if they are centered on subjects typically neglected by liberals like sports or gaming. The core strategy is to set up publications with progressive views but likely to have broader appeal. Honest partisanship should be the standard, rather than a pretend above-it-all “objective journalism” that in practice means bending reality completely beyond recognition to benefit Donald Trump.

Fine idea. Not going to happen. Too expensive up front and high maintenance. Ask Air America. Perhaps something smaller and stealthier.

What donors might support is something less ambitious but still with reach and penetration. As a pilot project in 2008, I ran local AM radio spots for months.  A couple times a day on a local progressive station and during drive time on the local conservative talk station. Rather than issue- or party-driven, the 30-sec ads were more “good citizeny” but with a progressive meta-message. 1,100 spots then cost about $8k (Lather, rinse, repeat.)

As it worked out, the spots I wrote and produced were not so different from the digital ads Anat Shenker-Osorio and women from Amplify now put together (Way To Win, ASO Communications, Moira Studio, Gutsy Media, We Make the Future Action). 

Perhaps Amplify might consider taking their messaging beyond the digital space into AM radio. The left has almost no presence in AM radio spaces, for example, in places like rural Arizona, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Right-wing talk and country music dominate in rural America.

AM spots are cheap earworms, and if they’re not so in-your-face about the message, even conservative station owners will run them because lefties’ money is green too. This requires no huge investment for infrastructure, just periodic purchasing and production. Amplify already has the tools, the talent, and a track record. Why reinvent the wheel? What they lack is budget for it. 

An acquaintance of mine once did something similar (though not as sophisticated and tested as Anat’s work) in targeted rural radio markets on a budget of only ~$100k. The point is to deliver a tight progressive message over and over and over until people absorb it without even realizing it. That’s how commercial advertising works, isn’t it?

If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit.

A Public Service Pronouncement

Please don’t spread conspiracy fantasies about the election, okay? TikTok and X are rocking with these two videos below (at least). They are — let’s not be polite about it — bullshit.

Before I even debunk them, let’s be clear again: This is bullshit, a live-fire exercise in a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing.

The TikToks allege that these people looked up their ballot status on Vote dor org and found nothing: “Please go check your ballot status. I just checked mine and my vote did not count! ”

Look, I’ve been doing election work a long time. What typical voters don’t know about the election process could fill libraries.

Item #1:

I'm hearing from many Kamala Harris voters who had the same experience as this woman. How the fuck can this happen in the United States of America? 😡😡😡👇 pic.twitter.com/pGbKy8lmj2

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 9, 2024

The video above has (of now) 1.2M engagements and 2k comments on TikTok, and 206k views on X. Her followup video notes that she’s in Washington state (voting there is virtually all by mail). She reports that her ballot status shows only “ballot mailed” and “ballot received, but not that it’s reviewed and accepted.

“As far as I am concerned, no. It doesn’t mean that it’s accepted,” says thewindwitch.

That much is right. The election is not official in Washington until after the canvass, Tuesday, November 26, 2024 and certification “twenty-one days after a general election” (Thursday, December 05, 2024). Ballots that arrive late may not be reviewed and counted for several days after Election Day. The process for Washington is outlined here. “Ballots continue to be processed, signatures verified, and votes tabulated until the election results are officially certified.” (I don’t know what their process is for “curing” late-arriving ballots.)

Thewindwitch urges people to go check their ballot status. But if they voted in person, the tool at Vote dor org won’t show anything. It’s for by-mail ballots only. My state (NC) publishes — if you know where to find the ftp site — who’s voted ea. day of early voting, as I did. Yup. I’m right there, with place and date. I’ve downloaded virtually the entire state, and still that list won’t be complete for weeks.

Item #2: More of the same.

What. The. Fuck. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/mqdbcopYg8

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 9, 2024

The video above has (of now) 1.3M engagements and 1.1k comments on TikTok and 245k views on X.

Bigbootyspookycutie figured out after posting her first video that she was in fact spreading misinformation and followed up with clarifcations. No, she didn’t do mail-in. She voted in person. So no, what she found out on the Vote dor org tool is meaningless. But she’s contributed to spreading election misinformation and further undermining faith in the election process. The damage is done.

By 11 p.m. last night, we find this:

What in the fuck is going on. This is the hundredth of these I’ve seen today. How many thousands more are there like this… something is really fucking rotten here. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but how do you explain this many inconsistencies and chance variables all happening at the exact same time.

Yes, you are a conspiracy fantacist.

Readers, please don’t do this.

For all the childless cat ladies a little ray of sunshine. It’s from last January but it illustrates that humans aren’t all bad:

BLASDELL, N.Y. — Ten Lives Club has now received over $270,000 in donations in support of Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass, and the organization shared that every dollar will be going right back to saving more cats.

“I was crying on the phone today, I just can’t believe it,” said Ten Lives Club Public Relations Manager, Kimberly LaRussa. “I’m just so happy for the cats.”

These kittens were born the day before the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills playoff game and have never known a day without Tyler Bass helping them out.

These three kittens have now watched over $270,000 in donations come in since Monday night.

“We are all speechless at Ten Lives Club and can’t believe this is happening,” Kimberly said.

“I hope it brings him a smile to know how many cats he is saving right now,” Kimberly said.

Kimberly shared this has been their largest amount ever received by far, topping even their largest fundraiser ten times over.

“It’s not a fundraiser, this is just the community saying they want to donate and they’re doing that, the Bills Mafia.”

It went up to alomst half a million dollars:

The ultimate example of Bills Mafia. ❤️💙

After receiving more than $400,000 in donations, the Tyler Bass Adoption Center is coming soon to @TenLivesClub! pic.twitter.com/QDSktdGyvz

— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) May 28, 2024

What prompted this dedication is the $400,000 in donations Ten Lives Club received in support of Bass, who saw Bills fans rally around him days after his missed field-goal attempt would have tied the AFC divisional game against the Kansas City Chiefs.

In the aftermath of the missed kick, Bass receive threats and abuse on social media. When fans learned about Bass’ connection with Ten Lives Club, they called the group wanting to pledge $22 in his name. Within days nearly $30,000 was raised.

Bass was a part of Ten Lives Club’s Show Your Soft Side campaign, and while other athletes who were involved chose to support dog shelters, Bass was all about cats.

Good man.

George Conway responded:

Bill is right

There are plenty of micro-explanations and micro-excuses for what happened in the presidential election of 2024. And on the margins, any number of them—indeed, almost certainly, a combination of them—made the difference. But their impact was only on the margins.

Don’t get me wrong—small margins and the factors that move them do matter, a lot, in elections—particularly in America in the 21st century. They deserve careful analysis, but only to a point. For the bottom line is that these considerations are not what we must focus on first and foremost today.

What deserves the lion’s share of our attention are the facts that a major political party could have even considered nominating Trump despite his manifest criminality, moral depravity, psychological derangement, and cognitive deficiencies and deterioration—and that nearly half the country would have voted for him no matter what he did or said and no matter whom he had run against.

That was the ultimate problem in this election, and remains so. We suffer from a deep sickness in our national polity. Far above all else, before it’s too late, thoughtful Americans of good faith must work together to confront, to better comprehend, and to ultimately address that grave and metastasizing ailment if our great experiment in self-governance is to survive. Scapegoating and blame-assigning about anything else serves no end but to diminish our chances of overcoming our profound national moral crisis.

With all of the necessary soul searching as a party it’s important to remember that even if the Democrats had been able to win a few more points and maintain the White House it wouldn’t change the fact that half the country would have voted for something dark and ugly.

If you find it distasteful to listen to those guys right now, I understand.

After we have sufficiently punished ourselves I hope that we will be able to dredge up the resources within to resume the battle.

In that case, here’s Rachel Maddow with a rousing call to arms that leads to the same place:

“This is what we're on this Earth to do as American citizens in this generation.”

I’m taking a break from the news, so when this #Maddow clip popped up, I skipped it.

But curiosity lured me back, and I’m glad it did.

It’s worth watching and sharing.pic.twitter.com/rgpHzouEj7

— TrumpsTaxes (@TrumpsTaxes) November 8, 2024

It seems so:

The most chilling moment of the election night carnage came a little before 1 a.m. ET. It wasn’t yet confirmed that Donald Trump would win, but the writing was on the wall. Assessing the newly transformed MAGA-friendly political landscape, the pro-Trump lobbyist and political commentator David Urban said on CNN: “Democracy is a luxury when you can’t pay your bills.”

Democracy as a luxury. Democracy in good times only. Democracy when it suits you.

This mindset – a precursor to fascist regimes in other countries – is why it feels like a white-wash to ascribe Trump’s victory to economic issues. It feels like a safe, socially acceptable reason to cite for rejecting Kamala Harris and the Biden baggage she carried.

It’s easy for political reporters and TV commentators to slip into gentle analysis of the election results by focusing on the economic factors (to the exclusion of misogyny, racism, and host of other drives of the electorate). But it doesn’t necessarily follow that Biden-era inflation and post-pandemic backlash means jettisoning democracy. That’s a choice.

When we talk about democracy as a luxury that means everything that comes with democracy: free and fair elections, majority rule, and the rule of law.

And so America’s experiment in autocracy begins …

When the price of eggs and bacon are higher than they were five years ago, who cares about rights and the constitution, amirite?

That seems to be the calculation. Luckily we have a narcissistic, game show host, heir to a fortune who lost money at everything he’s every touched to fix that bacon and egg problem.

Watch what they watch, hear what they hear

Brian Beutler wrote an excellent piece about the Democratic Party and the working class that you should read in its entirety. I think his analysis of the dysfunctional relationship is spot on. But the piece is called “Democrats PLEASE Try To Fix This Problem — If they ignore the media environment in their 2024 post-mortems, it will be the first major error of the second Trump era” and this is why:

There may be much for liberals to learn walking in the shoes of working class or rural midwesterners, but few Democratic officials would find the experience shocking. They know, at least on an intellectual level, all the ways working class life can be a slog. The talking points they write don’t misdescribe the struggle. The policies they enact aren’t unrelated to the challenges Americans face: Insulin and hearing-aid costs, insurance premiums, wages, roads, worker leverage, etc. 

What I think would make a lot of these elites go bug-eyed would be to spend a day shadowing working-class or rural midwesterners purely to understand the kind of information they absorb, intentionally and passively, from their earliest moments to when they shut off their televisions, phones, or computers at night. I believe they’d be disturbed. I believe they’d be so alarmed that they’d convene the most powerful people in the party and declare an emergency.

I hope they try an experiment like that. And then I hope they act. Because my experience over the past eight years tells me they won’t believe it when someone like me pleads with them.

Being a successful party requires more than just competent governance and legislative success. It requires understanding all the country’s major challenges—including homegrown ones—and addressing them directly. Democrats needed to create a cure for the fascist mind virus circulating in America. Instead they created a sedative, hoping that, with sufficient bedrest, Americans would neutralize the virus themselves. If they don’t revisit that decision, the sickness will keep getting worse, and may lead us to ruin.

There is a ton of commentary out there about how the Democrats need to create a new and more modern media infrastructure which is not uncommon in the wake of a losing election. I recall many a blogpost written on this subject during the Bush years. It seems we’re always playing catch-up. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true and with the rapidly changing media environment of thelast few years it seems clear that we have fallen more behind than ever.

I live on the internet and I don’t think I was aware of this. It’s so easy to retreat into your comfortable silo among your friends. And I am probably too old, too west coast and too female to truly appreciate the media landscape Beutler describes. But I hope that some of the people with the means and and the focus do so and then make a move to figure out how to deal with it. It’s clear to me that it’s vital if we ever expect to make this system work properly again.

Get ready for the deportation grift. It’s going to be epic:

President-elect Donald Trump told NBC News on Thursday that one of his first priorities upon taking office in January would be to make the border “strong and powerful.” When questioned about his campaign promise of mass deportations, Trump said his administration would have “no choice” but to carry them out.

Trump said he considers his sweeping victory over Vice President Kamala Harris a mandate “to bring common sense” to the country.

“We obviously have to make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country,” he said. “And you know, I’m not somebody that says, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ We want people to come in.”

As a candidate, Trump had repeatedly vowed to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history.” Asked about the cost of his plan, he said, “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

Heather Cox Rixchardon wrote on her substack:

GEO chief executive officer Brian Evans told investors that filling currently empty beds could bring in $400 million a year and that the company can scale up its current surveillance, monitoring, and transportation programs to handle millions of immigrants. “This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he said.

A blank check for the DHS round-up. Sounds great. Big government spending on personnel, private camps, transportation. It’s going to be a candy store. I guess Elon’s going to have to take his 2 trillion in cuts out of somebody else’s hide. Heath care sounds like a ripe target. Education for sure. Maybe Social security.

This almost made me throw the phone against the wall when I read it:

Trump also spoke about his phone calls with Harris and President Joe Biden since the election.

“Very nice calls, very respectful both ways,” Trump said, describing the conversations, adding that Harris “talked about transition, and she said she’d like it to be smooth as can be, which I agree with, of course.”

How fucking dare he say one word about a smooth transition. He is, dare I say it, garbage.

I guess everything he did last time is just going to memory holed now. After his outrageous temper tantrum and Big Lie when he didn’t win, now he’s a statesman expecting to be treated respectfully? You can almost hear his henchmen snickering behind his back about the pathetic Democrats. It’s infuriating.

Now that we’ve had a chance to catch our breath a little bit and get through the grieving process over last Tuesday’s election, the inevitable recriminations have begun in earnest. Social media is awash with accusations against the Biden administration, the Harris campaign, the left, the right and everything in between. The Democrats are out of touch with Real America, they don’t know how to talk to Latinos, men, young voters, anyone really except college educated women. Was it an expression of deep desire for fascism, misogyny and racism or a simple admiration for the reality show ringmaster who tells them what they want to hear? I suspect we will spend many years dissecting what happened that put Donald Trump back inthe White House this year.

There is no doubt a kernal of truth in much of what people are saying. Any losing team has to look at their game plan and question where they went wrong. This campaign was especially fraught with President Joe Biden belatedly realizing that he wasn’t capable of campaigning, and the party taking the risk of running a woman and person of color against one of the most racist, misogynist demagogues ever to run on a major party ticket. It was never going to be easy. It’s astonishing that we ever thought it would be. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir observed yesterday, liberals will have to do some deep soul searching to determine what the party really is and how to adjust itself to what is clearly a new political landscape.

I think many of us just assumed that the nation would never elect Trump again because he had not only been repudiated once, he had subsequently attempted a coup, incited an insurrection and had been foun guilty of fraud and defamation and was currently under indictment at both the federal and state levels. He is a convicted felon. How could it even be possible that such a person would be returned to the White House?

The clues were there. The opinion polls had Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied for months with the margin of error showing that either side could have had a blowout. Joe Biden had been extremely unpopular for the past two years and the wrong track numbers are very high. People have lost faith in virtually all institutions, particularly the press which they believe is corrupt. There has just been an overwhelming feeling of discontent and unhappiness in the cultural zeitgeist for the past four years.

People are angry about immigration even though most of them aren’t affected by it at all.They are upset about culture war issues like diversity training and transgender kids even though they aren’t personally affected by that either. But mostly they are distressed about the economy, specifically inflation. Everyone bitches about higher grocery prices and restaurant tabs to the point where it’s become a sort of national bonding exercise. If there’s one thing everyone can agree on in this politically polarized country it’s that prices are just too damned high.

All of this is in spite of the American economy being literally “the envy of the world” with a robust job market that hasn’t been seen since the 1960s, roaring markets, high consumer spending on durable goods and travel and what would normally be considered a very reasonable inflation rate. But as the NY Times’s Paul Krugman has discussed at length while most people feel they’re doing ok they believe the rest of the country is in terrible shape. Nonetheless, inflation is cited by most voters as their most important concern. (Those numbers are highly driven by partisanship, so I think we can be sure they’ll turn around pretty quickly once Trump is in office and Republicans attribute the already good economy to his magical genius.)

People have been very unhappy for the past four years in this country and I think inflation has simply become the symbol of that unhappiness. It represents that feeling of things being out of control, that nothing is working right anymore. It is a daily reminder of how things went bad in 2020 and never fully recovered. And, as it turns out, this is true all over the world.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion over the past couple of days about the startling fact that the Democrats are just the latest in an unprecedented string of elections over the past few years in which the incumbent party has lost vote share and leadership been ousted. It is a global phenomenon.

Just to clarify: this isn’t just the first time since WW2 that all incumbent parties in developed countries lost vote share.

It’s the first time since this data was first recorded in 1905. Essentially the first time in the history of democracy (universal suffrage began in 1894). pic.twitter.com/04hdpN8aq0

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 7, 2024

As Derek Thompson in The Atlantic put it:

A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.

The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic…

Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.

Trump was one of the earliest casualties of this anti-incumbent movement, Unfortunately for us, we were unable to vanquish him sufficiently to prevent his return and the consequences of that are going to be particularly bad. The maintream press managed to normalize him over the past four years, first by refusing to remind Americans how bad he was while he was in exile openly plotting his revenge and then “sanewashing” his absurd lies and mental deterioration. As a result, him being the alternative made sense to a lot of people we didn’t expect to vote for him. They thought by doing so that maybe we could just erase the last five years and pick up where we left off.

This election was an emotional tidal wave, one that’s engulfed the whole world in the wake of the pandemic, the trauma of which we clearly have yet to fully process. We will eventually pull out of this. The problem is that when tidal waves recede they leave a tremendous amount of damage in their wake and I’m afraid it’s going to be especially devastating in America.

Salon

A marketing problem? Really?

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them,” closed out each episode of a police procedural from the mid-twentieth century. It also approximates the hot takes this week and in coming months on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election to a fascism-curious, [your list of Donald Trump’s crimes and character flaws here], in obvious mental decline, etc. The world now faces a period of disruption to rival post-September 11 wars, the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a fresh land war in Europe. And maybe worse.

The twenty-first century has been nothing if not disruption. Trump fosters it. He keeps rivals off balance with it and blames Others for it. MAGA finds its scapegoats primarily among immigrants but doesn’t limit itself to them. Where pundits find theirs for what happened on Tuesday confounds me.

As after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, the usual suspects will fall back on their usual simplistic answers. Remember “economic anxiety“? A week ahead of that election, Libby Nelson wrote at Vox of Trump supporters who’d been “studied and caricatured and psychoanalyzed“:

Explanations abound: They’re stricken with economic anxiety. They’re anxious about their social status. They feel left behind by the federal government. They’re authoritarians who want a forceful leader. They’re racists who oppose the changing demographics and norms of the US.

But there’s another important factor that these analyses have largely left out: sexism. Three political scientists who studied the connection between sexism, emotions, and support for Trump found that the more hostile voters were toward women, the more likely they were to support Trump.

Even while abortion rights measures passed in seven states on Tuesday, deep misogyny of the Nick Fuentes (430k Twitter followers) variety was there all along. Within less than 48 hours of Trump’s victory, reports The New Republic, women “have found themselves the subjects of hate campaigns designed to belittle and marginalize them.”

“Your body, my choice. Forever,” posted Fuentes.

And not just women.

A text campaign—and obvious hate crime—issued a threat to students of color across the nation, claiming the recipients had been “selected” as “house slaves” and were due to appear at plantations.

Yet when the country elects a fascist demagogue, misogynists and racists are not the go-to fall guys for the press and pundit class. Nor economic or status anxiety. It’s Democrats.

Why did Kamala Harris’s message of joy and hope fail? What might Democrats have done differently to woo the working class? What if they had edged out Joe Biden earlier? Did Harris listen to the wrong consultants? Did she spend too much time (or too little) courting the wrong set of voters? Was she too far left? Not left enough? Did Democrats focus too much on the wrong inequalities? Did Democrats fail “the test of persuasion“?

Is it just me, or is it nuts that pundits are analyzing why Democrats lost the 2024 election without examining what’s happened to American society? That patriarchy will not go quietly? Or that 73 million of us chose an autocratic, misogynist felon, xenophobe, and national security risk because, as Brian Beutler put it, “the price of bacon increased“? As if millions face violent deportation, Ukrainians face learning Russian, Gazans face unfettered slaughter, and the world witnesses the collapse of NATO and the advent of fascism American-style because the Democratic Party has a marketing problem?

Black public school students are reportedly getting texts that they've been chosen for a cotton-picking plantation and even "assigned fields." But don't worry, folks, Trump's election was simply a rebuke of Bidenomics! pic.twitter.com/5IUqShGWMg

— Audrey Clare Farley (@AudreyCFarley) November 7, 2024

Is the decades-long, oligarch-funded, right-wing campaign to define deviancy down now invisible to the press because the deviancy it cultivated and Trump exploited is now the norm?

“Sure, we had previously lost an election to a talented demagogue. Maybe that was partly our fault. But we could still consider our values to be mainstream and the other side’s to be aberrant,” Jonathan Rauch laments at The UnPopulist. What now? We may never know exactly why Harris lost, but the people have spoken. Or primal screamed:

We on the liberal-democracy side need to recognize the implications. We lost more than the election. We also lost the standing to claim that our values represent the moral mainstream. We now must function in a world where MAGA not only controls the country’s government but defines its norms—more, at least, than we do.

This will make it harder to hold ground from which to criticize Trump and MAGA, no matter what they do or say. When we protest the latest Trump outrage (and there will be many), we will be accused of elitism and irrelevance. “If you’re the moral arbiters,” MAGA’s allies will say, “why can’t you persuade anybody? Why is it that no one cares about your indignation? Might it be because the public is tired of your moral grandstanding? Might it be because you’re wrong?” We’ll have to fight for moral oxygen these next few years, and it’s a fight we might not win.

Complicating matters further: In the teeth of the election’s permissioning of grotesque political behavior, those who have stood firm against MAGA’s depredations will feel even more pressure to give way or stand down. Some will lack the energy to keep insisting that MAGA is not morally normal; others will conclude that criticizing MAGA is futile or counterproductive, and also potentially dangerous; yet others will, as Tocqueville warned, internalize the electorate’s verdict, concluding that the majority of American voters can’t be wrong. However it happens, we must expect a struggle to maintain our own moral confidence—again, a fight we might not win.

Americans did this to themselves, argues George Conway, a staunch Republican until 2018:

We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.

And what Americans chose for themselves.

“The system was never perfect,” Conway observes, “but it inched toward its own betterment, albeit in fits and starts. But in the end, the system the Framers set up—and indeed, all constitutional regimes, however well designed—cannot protect a free people from themselves.”

Jessica Valenti gets the last word.

 

View on Threads

And some quick weekend reading

As we lick our wounds and brace for what’s coming, two threads are worth your time.

New Jersey Senator-elect Andy Kim (D) read transcripts of listening sessions. Voters, he says, have a deep disgust with politics. I’d argue that that disgust has deliberately been cultivated. Whatever.

“There were other issues that they raised but the main point I wanted to convey is that the hinge was on what it means to be ‘different.’ Not about being just different from Trump, but different from the same old same old entrenched politics that people are wholly angry at.”

In 2020 I was one of 7 dems that won a district that Trump won, so I held a series of listening sessions with people who voted for Trump and voted for me to understand their actions. I reread the transcripts yesterday and much of it felt like it could have been said today. THREAD pic.twitter.com/dkvi5gOaZx

— Andy Kim (@AndyKimNJ) November 7, 2024

Norm Ornstein tweets, “Plenty more understood who Trump is, and what he represents, but still voted for him, in a much broader willingness to blow up the status quo &roll the dice. I have little doubt that most of them will deeply regret this. They will have blown up their own well-being along the way.”

There will be a lot of soul-searching among Democrats, as there should be. Those who criticize Joe Biden for not dropping out earlier, or Kamala Harris for her campaign, are looking in the wrong place. This was a broader rejection ofe ruling elites. 1

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) November 7, 2024

Ornstein agrees there is a “broader rejection of ruling elites.” It’s not that it’s not deserved, I’d add, but that too has deliberately been cultivated to serve the purposes of ruling elites. They don’twant to govern. They want to rule.

Jason Statler takes up that theme and offers observations:

I had three epiphanies that may offer some keys to understanding of how we fight back.

1. The bias against women is built into American culture, and we can only ever hope to overcome it once we free women from being our social safety net.
   My mind has been irreparably “pilled,” for lack of a more current word, by the work of Jessica Calaraco. Her book HOLDING IT TOGETHER explains how you cannot separate misogyny from America’s broken approach to caring for those in need. And if you want to understand how Trump won, listening to Jessica will clarify a lot.
2. The media prefers fascism.
   Marcy Wheeler sensed early in this race that the media was failing or succeeding, depending on your POV, by refusing to clarify what Trump and his candidacy meant. Blame consolidation, the billionaires, and the collapse of local media. It’s all the same thing. We can only do our best to replace journalism in the short term. That’s why we made Ball of Thread. Not because we thought it could replace a broken media but just because we had to do something. I believe Marcy has offered a history of 2016-2020 that DOES NOT EXIST anywhere else, and it provides the most straightforward explanation of what’s coming next as Trump obsessively seeks revenge. I promise you that’s what’s next.
3. Propaganda works. Strategic racism works. And we’ve tried everything we can to defeat it, except directly confronting it.
   Ian Haney López should be the most famous academic in America. His work explains the rise of the right and the appeal of fascism better than anyone. And my conversation with him in October clarified how as good as the Harris/Walz campaign was—and it was so good in so many ways—they were not confronting Trump’s most effective weapon. And I point that out not because I want to look back or re-lose this election forever but because he has dire warnings about how the rise of AI will only make the situation worse.

Best of luck to us all.