Sunrise seen over the Atlantic Ocean through cirrus clouds on the Jersey Shore at Spring Lake, New Jersey, U.S. Photo by Nick Harris, (CC BY 2.5)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jason Stanley offered this explanation for what’s happening to us and it’s been around for a couple of millenia:
For 2,300 years, at least since Plato’s Republic, philosophers have known how demagogues and aspiring tyrants win democratic elections. The process is straightforward, and we have now just watched it play out.
In a democracy, anyone is free to run for office, including people who are thoroughly unsuitable to lead or preside over the institutions of government. One telltale sign of unsuitability is a willingness to lie with abandon, specifically by representing oneself as a defender against the people’s perceived enemies, both external and internal. Plato regarded ordinary people as being easily controlled by their emotions, and thus susceptible to such messaging – an argument that forms the true foundation of democratic political philosophy (as I have argued in previous work).
[…]
In my own work, I have tried to describe, in minute detail, why and how people who feel slighted (materially or socially) come to accept pathologies – racism, homophobia, misogyny, ethnic nationalism, and religious bigotry – which, under conditions of greater equality, they would reject.
And it is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today. If anything, America has come to be singularly defined by its massive wealth inequality, a phenomenon that cannot but undermine social cohesion and breed resentment. With 2,300 years of democratic political philosophy suggesting that democracy is not sustainable under such conditions, no one should be surprised by the outcome of the 2024 election.
But why, one might ask, has this not already happened in the US? The main reason is that there had been an unspoken agreement among politicians not to engage in such an extraordinarily divisive and violent form of politics. Recall the 2008 election. John McCain, the Republican, could have appealed to racist stereotypes or conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth, but he refused to take this path, famously correcting one of his own supporters when she suggested that the Democratic candidate was a foreign-born “Arab.” McCain lost, but he is remembered as an American statesperson of unimpeachable integrity.
Of course, American politicians regularly appeal more subtly to racism and homophobia to win elections; it is, after all, a successful strategy. But the tacit agreement not to conduct such a politics explicitly – what the political theorist Tali Mendelberg calls the norm of equality – ruled out appealing too openly to racism. Instead, it had to be done through hidden messages, dog whistles, and stereotypes (such as by talking about “laziness and crime in the inner city”).
But under conditions of deep inequality, this coded brand of politics eventually becomes less effective than the explicit kind. What Trump has done since 2016 is throw out the old tacit agreement, labeling immigrants as vermin and his political opponents as “the enemies within.” Such an explicit “us versus them” politics, as philosophers have always known, can be highly effective.
Democratic political philosophy, then, has been correct in its analysis of the Trump phenomenon. Tragically, it also offers a clear prediction of what will come next. According to Plato, the kind of person who campaigns this way will rule as a tyrant.
He concludes that our run as a democracy is over and there will no longer be free and fair elections.
That is certainly possible. But the one thing we have going for us (and against us) is that Trump is a monumental moron and many of the people around him atre nothing more than petty grifters and star fuckers. Even his pet oligarchs are weird and drug addled. Maybe that’s typical of tyrannnies but this is a big complicated country. It may just be beyond their ability to pull this off.
The biggest gainer was Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and one of Trump’s most outspoken and dedicated supporters, whose wealth jumped $26.5 billion to $290 billion Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ wealth grew $7.1 billion a week after defending his decision to withhold the Washington Post’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, another Trump supporter, saw his net worth rose $5.5 billion Wednesday.
Other gainers include former Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Google executives Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. Although none of those billionaires endorsed a candidate this year, they have spoken in favor of Democratic candidates and causes in the past.
Collectively, the top 10 richest people gained $64 billion.
Bloomberg notes it’s the “biggest daily increase” of wealth it’s seen since the index began in 2012,. The market rallied Wednesday as the election concluded swiftly and with expectations that Trump will usher in a new era of deregulation and other pro-business laws and policies investors believe could benefit the stock market overall — especially billionaires who hold much of the world’s wealth.
The Billionaire Boys Club is very happy indeed. They simply cannot ever have enough money.
Jimmy Kimmel: “It was a terrible night for women for children…For our allies in Ukraine for NATO…a terrible night for everyone who voted against him, and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too. You just don't realize it yet”pic.twitter.com/OE8IoG0kWK
Donald Trump’s allies and some in the private sector have been quietly preparing to detain and deport migrants residing in the United States on a large scale, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.
Immigration was a cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and while he repeatedly touted promises of mass deportation on the trail – putting increased emphasis on interior enforcement compared to his 2016 fixation on the border wall – members of his orbit and some in the private sector discussed what that plan would look like, according to the sources.
Trump’s day one priority is to reinstate his former administration’s border policies and reverse those of President Joe Biden, senior Trump adviser Jason Miller told CNN.
Early discussions among Trump’s team have focused on removing undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, a source familiar with the team’s preliminary plans told CNN. A key issue under consideration is how, when and if to deport immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, commonly known as Dreamers.
Targeting Dreamers would be a departure from the historically bipartisan support they’ve enjoyed. Some are temporarily protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows recipients to live and work in the US.
Tom Homan, who previously served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, could potentially serve as one of the leads on immigration in the administration, sources said.
“It’s not gonna be – a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” Homan told CBS News in an interview that aired last month.
“They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ‘em based on numerous, you know, investigative processes,” he added.
It won’t take much “investigation” to deport the DREAMers. We told them that if they registered with the government they would have a path to citizenship. The same with asylum seekers and others on temporary visas. Just go in with gins and betray them. Easy peasy.
You can expect this to get back on track right away too:
They won’t be able to round up 12 million (or 30 million as Trump says) at least not in the beginning. But they can make an example of many people and they can do it dramatically in ritual fashion to thrill the cult. It’s primitive stuff.
If you have a basement or an attic you might want to clean it up and get it ready just in case your neighbor, nanny, gardener, local school kid needs a place to hide.
What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?
Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?
What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?
Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.
What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?
LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.
They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.
Please click over and read that whole piece. There are dozens of examples of situations like these we are likely to be confronted with in Trump Redux. Get ready.
In the months leading up to the election, Donald Trump and his Republican allies warned relentlessly of widespread voter fraud. Trump accused Democrats of trying to steal the election by cheating, and he repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results unless he won.
On Election Day, Trump further amplified those claims and suggested that there was voter fraud in Philadelphia and Detroit, two major cities in battleground states. Elon Musk’s “Election Integrity Community” discussion page on X was also rife with conspiracy theories about Democrats cheating.
Yet on election night, as the results looked to be in Trump’s favor, the claims tapered off. Instead of dark warnings about election fraud, posts on X’s “election integrity” page grew self-congratulatory and “the urgency to investigate wrongdoing subsided,” The Washington Post reported. Far-right channels on the Telegram platform, where voter fraud claims were widespread in recent days, suddenly grew quiet as well, according to The New York Times.
And, most significantly, there was no more talk of voter fraud from Trump, who spent months sowing doubt about the integrity of the 2024 presidential election — and who, to this day, refuses to concede the 2020 election.
Trump said he won in a landslide in 2020 and the Democrats allegedly managed to steal it from him. Why didn’t they do it this time? Just lazy?
“Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy,” Trump said when asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt whether he would “pardon yourself” or “fire Jack Smith” if reelected.
“I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said.
The discussions between Smith and DOJ leadership are expected to last several days.
Justice Department officials are looking at options for how to wind down the two criminal cases while also complying with a 2020 memo from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel about indictments or prosecutions of sitting presidents.
They’re not mentioning a fairly obvious detail. According to governing regulations, when a Special Counsel finishes his work, he must write a report to the Attorney General.
Closing documentation. At the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.
So if Smith is totally done, he has to write a report.
These reports that Smith is engaged in these discussions come as Bill Barr and others are yapping their mouths about Smith simply dismissing the cases. By telling the press that Smith is already working on shutting down the cases, Smith pre-empts any effort from Trump to offer another solution — and does so before Trump files his response to the immunity brief on November 21.
In other words, this may be no more than an effort to get one more bite at the apple, to describe what Smith found, which would be particularly important if there are still undisclosed aspects of the case, as I suggested there might be.
Where things get interesting, though, is Trump’s co-conspirators, people like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. Those guys could be prosecuted, as Roger Stone was after Mueller finished up. Trump would order his Attorney General to dismiss the cases — they’re never going to be prosecuted. But it would impose a political cost right at the beginning of his administration.
I have a sneaking suspicion that report will never see the light of day. We’ve just heard tapes of notorious trafficker of underage girls, Jeffrey Epstein, telling Michael Wolffe that he and Trump were best friends for 10 years and the media yawned. I don’t think anyone will care about a report on Trump’s crimes at this point even if they tried to prosecute Giuliani and Stone and Trump pardoned them the first day.
Put a fork in it. Trump skated again. It’s one of the things his cult worships him for — nobody can ever take him down. Teflon Don. I think the only thing that will get him is the grim reaper and that’s probably when he’s 96 years old asleep in his bed. There is no justice …
“Hey Bitch! We control your bodies! Guess what? Guys win again, ok? Yes, men win again and we conrol your bodies. Hi. I’m your Republican congressman.”
The takesabout this election, hot and otherwise, are already coming fast and furious and I expect they will continue with tedious regularity for some time to come. I’m guilty of it myself jabbering away on podcasts and radio shows yesterday on no sleep and too much adrenaline. I’ll share some of those thoughts here as I get my head straight over the next little while.
But I have been reading a lot of instant reaction pieces and I must say that more than anything I persuaded by the anti-incumbency analysis which I posted about yesterday. Here’s another argument laying that out from Derek Thompson in the Atlantic:
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. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.
Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. 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.
This has been a year of global anti-incumbency within a century of American anti-incumbency. Since 2000, every midterm and presidential election has seen a change in control of the House, Senate, or White House except for 2004 (when George W. Bush eked out a win) and 2012 (when Barack Obama won reelection while Republicans held the House). The U.S. appears to be in an age of unusually close elections that swing back and forth, in which every sitting president spends the majority of his term with an underwater approval rating.
There will be a rush to blame Kamala Harris—the candidate, her campaign, and her messaging. But there is no escaping the circumstances that Harris herself could never outrun. She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere. An analysis by the political scientist John Sides predicted that a sitting president with Biden’s approval rating should be expected to win no more than 48 percent of the two-party vote. As of Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris is currently projected to win about 47.5 percent of the popular vote. Her result does not scream underperformance. In context, it seems more like a normal performance.
[…]
If there is cold comfort for Democrats, it is this: We are in an age of politics when every victory is Pyrrhic, because to gain office is to become the very thing—the establishment, the incumbent—that a part of your citizenry will inevitably want to replace. Democrats have been temporarily banished to the wilderness by a counterrevolution, but if the trends of the 21st century hold, then the very anti-incumbent mechanisms that brought them defeat this year will eventually bring them back to power.
This election is so inexplicable to me that the idea of a national trauma driving people to vote irrationally makes some sense to me. There’s something bigger behind this than normal politics and the fact that it’s a global phenomenon lends credence to this idea.
That’s not to say we don’t have agency. But it does mean that might be able to more clearly analyze the situation and plan accordingly. The sad part is that the out party in our case is led by a pathological narcissistic imbecile so the risk of letting the other side take over is enormous. But that’s where we are and it would probably be good to study this phenomenon to see how we might mitigate that risk and plan for the future.
Update —
A thread by politics professor Rob Ford with some back-up data:
Decided to go through this systematically. Incumbent government performance in wealthy democracies since March 2022, when Ukraine invasion really spiked things upwards:
South Korea President (March 22) – incumbent term limited, incumbent party lost Malta (March 22) – incumbent Labour party re-elected, gains seats Hungary (April 22) – incumbent Orban govt re-elected with larger majority Serbia (April 22) – incumbent Pres re-elected but loses Parliamentary majority
France (April/June 22) – incumbent Pres re-elected with reduced share, loses majority in Nat Assembly Slovenia (Apr 22) – incumbent govt defeated Australia (May 22) – incumbent right wing govt defeated Sweden (Sept 22) – incumbent left wing govt defeated
Italy (Sept 22) – far right coalition led by Meloni sweeps aside previous governing parties LN and M5S Bulgaria (Oct 22) – largest party in governing coalition falls sharply, change of govt Denmark (Nov 22) – centre-left govt re-elected, PM party gains seats
Israel (Nov 22) – messy result, but sees incumbent PM replaced and Netanyahu return Estonia (Mar 23) – messy result, party which topped poll previous time falls, party of PM Kallas (who took over mid term) gains Bulgaria (Apr 23) – messy, far right and populists make most gains
Finland (Apr 23) – centre-left govt coalition defeated, right and radical right opposition parties make strong gains Greece (May/June 23) – centre-right govt re-elected Spain (July 23) – centre-left govt clings on despite big gains for centre-right oppo, rad rt falls sharply
Slovakia (Sep 23) – incumbent govt defeated by populist opposition New Zealand (Oct 23) – centre-left incumbent defeated by centre-right opposition Poland (Oct 23) – rad rt incumbent defeated by centre-right opposition
Switzerland (Oct 23) – rad rt gain seats, greens and liberals lose seats Netherlands (Nov 23) – governing coalition parties fall sharply, rad rt tops the poll Portugal (Mar 24) – centre left govt defeated by centre right oppo
Croatia (Apr 24) – incumbent coalition re-elected, greens gain most seats European Parliament (Jun 24) – Greens, Liberals and centre left lost ground, radicals of left and right gain ground Belgium (June 24) – PM’s party loses most of its seats. Belgian govts are messy
France (June/July 24) – incumbent President’s party gets a pasting, far right and far left make gains UK (July 24) – incumbent centre-right govt wiped out in a landslide, but with big vote gains for Greens, rad rt and rad left independents
Austria (Sep 24) – big losses for gov coalition of centre-right and greens, big gains for rad rt Lithuania (Oct 24) – big losses for largest party in govt coalition Japan (Oct 24) – LDP, near permanent party of govt, defeated US (Nov 24) – centre-left incumbent Dems defeated
We’ve also had a bunch of bad to historically bad results in poorer democracies too, including ANC losing majority in S Africa, BJP losing majority in India, governing party defeated for the first time ever in Botswana, incumbent Pres defeated in Brasil, etc. Tough time to be an incumbent!
Three big lessons here IMHO – (1) voters have been punishing incumbents everywhere, regardless of political orientation, length in office etc (2) Voters have been switching to all kinds of opposition, regardless of political orientation but…(3) radical anti-system parties (of right and left) have done well in many places, again regardless of who’s in govt
Trump benefitted from all three trends – he’s running against the incumbent, as leader of the only opposition, and he’s seen as radical/anti-system
It remains to be seen whether or not reports of this country’s demise are greatly exaggerated. On the demise side, a majority of Americans on Tuesday chose to end this nation’s 250-year experiment in self-government. Not that they know it yet. This week, argues Brian Beutler, they handed “unchecked power to a narcissistic criminal demagogue because the price of bacon increased.” They may also, in fact, have surrendered their sovereignty without firing a shot.
(What will the more militant do with the guns and ammo they’ve stocked for the coming civil war about which they’ve fantasized?)
On the greatly exaggerated side are people like Beutler in England, who, being shielded from Trumpism by the Atlantic Ocean, have perspective lacked by those of us staring down its barrel. He taxonomizes this week’s voters into three classes: True Never Trumpers, the Hold Your Nose Brigade, and people for whom “The Cruelty is the Point.” Afterwards, he considers what life in an authoritarian United States means for those of us not in the cult or cult-adjacent:
What’s most dangerous, then, is turning a democratic state into an authoritarian one. And the way you do that is by warping institutions and removing constraints on the powerful, ensuring that bad policy cannot be reversed, obliterating responsiveness and avoiding accountability.
So, for example, a corrupt president who faces no oversight because the courts have been captured and the bureaucracy has been purged is a far more lasting and dangerous erosion of democracy than a bad law. When it’s the system itself that’s damaged, institutions can crack under the weight of authoritarian pressure.
The problem, of course, is that citizens care most about politics when daily activities and expressions of personal identity are at stake—the price of eggs and milk or the endless culture wars that tap into our sense of who we are.
Few voters are galvanized by institutional change and the apparent minutiae of government oversight. Put differently, the process of democracy is what defines the system in contrast to authoritarianism, but the lived experience of daily life and cultural identity is what most voters care about.
We’ll see how much Trump women care when he signs a national abortion ban and lies about saying he wouldn’t.
Despots and their wannabe apprentices exploit this mismatch, galvanizing people with visceral expressions of victimhood and focusing attention on perceived internal enemies while simultaneously unshackling themselves from institutional constraints.
Underneath the more visible Trumpian chaos, the true fight for democracy will now take place in the labyrinthine realm of bureaucratic oversight, in the courts that choose accountability over submission, the journalists who bravely refuse to self-censor, the general who refuses to break the law, the Congressional committee that simply won’t back down.
And, above all, that fight will be with the voters who band together with neighbors from all walks of life—the people who might come together for the simple joys of a parade—to engage in mass protest when a president pardons himself, or purges civil servants, or takes a wrecking ball to democratic institutions. That’s how serious adults adorn themselves in real patriotism.
The problem is Trump’s go-to tactic is delay. He wears down opponents by outlasting them in the tug-of-war. And many of us are already exhausted. He maintains his following by fueling cultists’ grievances and sense of victimhood. Ironic, since as Beutler sees abroad, Americans are envied around the world for the opulence of our lifestyles. And decadence.
When the elevated price of bacon is your great political calling and the inconveniences of Starbucks are your personal cross to bear, the grotesque decadence of prosperity can warp itself into a bizarre victimhood. Many of the most devoted disciples of soon-to-be President Trump are some of the most fortunate people on the planet, like the woman who joined the January 6th mob after flying in on a private jet.
But we cannot succumb to a similar narrative of victimhood when an election goes the wrong way—even when the stakes are so high. We are lucky, even now. Wallowing in the depths of worry and despair, it’s important to feel fresh resolve with a sense of perspective—not to diminish the challenges and perils we face—but to understand that the worst doom, even in these dark moments, need not be America’s final answer.
For me, fresh resolve may have to wait a day or two.
I’m putting my faith into young people like my friend Anderson Clayton, NC Democrats’ state chair. She’s got enough resolve for a slew of us old farts.
Americans believe their own bullshit. A large faction, for example, believes the United States was founded under divine guidance as a nation of, by, and for Christians. Never mind that Christians built the country by ethnically cleansing indigenous populations and built its economy on the backs of enslaved Africans. We carry around pocket copies of the U.S. Constitution, wave our flags, brand ourselves Team Freedom, think reality TV is unscripted, and pretend professional wrestling is real. We’re simplistic and jingoistic like “great again.” It’s not just a right-wing behavior.
“We are the United States of America,” President Biden ends many speeches, so many that you know the rest. After particularly ugly episodes, politicians reflexively declare, this is “not who we are.” Biden’s closing always struck me as quaint, a little hoary, but sincere and well-meaning. “It’s not who we are” grates, another lie we tell ourselves while whistling past the graveyard the way Biden ceremoniously crosses himself with a grin.
On Tuesday, America proved the lie. We elected a pathological liar, an autocrat, a felon and worse, amoral, dishonest, and “fascist to the core.” His next most public lie will be when he places his hand on a Bible and swears before the world (again) to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States neither he nor his most ardent supporters believe in. The flag-humper will then set about wrecking both the Constitution and the country in a frenzy of vengeance. He will twist the law he doesn’t believe in to avoid prosecution, punish his enemies, and reward sycophants. I’d say reward friends except Donald Trump has none.
“With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote,” writes David Kurtz, executive editor of Talking Points Memo. Without help from the quirky Electoral College system this time:
This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.
Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.
If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.
Who are we kidding? Ourselves, over and over. Black women? Not so much, write Erica L. Green and Maya King in The New York Times on Trump’s reelection:
It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.
Michelle Goldberg concurs as she braces for a period of mourning before facing what’s ahead:
Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.
It’s too early, Kurtz writes, to attempt to rally people to action. And to what action, exactly? Pundits gonna pundit and blame-game. It’s what they’re paid for. The people who dish out bad advice will dish even more. They will blame Harris, Biden, “the Democrats,” college-educated elites, post-pandemic inflation. Gaza, etc. But what Black women know is that the deep divide in this country is more cultural than political or economic. In the end, there was nothing — no ad, no policy, no outreach — that could bridge it.
That said, so now what? Kurtz advises:
There is immediate and hard work to do in politics. The marginalized and the disenfranchised are always hurt first and most with the kind of upheaval that we expect to come, but it is worse this time because hurting them has been advertised as the point. People who have been doing their jobs under the rule of law and in support of democratic and civil society institutions – investigators, prosecutors, judges, the press, government workers, librarians, teachers, opposition party leaders – have been promised retribution. Protecting those under threat will be amongst the most noble work of the coming years.
The powers of federal officeholders, we have been told repeatedly and plainly, will be abused to exact revenge against perceived foes, which means anyone who presents a challenge to Trump and MAGA Republicans holding unbridled and absolute power. I take these promises at face value. Countering those efforts, upholding what’s left of the rule of law, fortifying what remains of the democratic system will be similarly noble work.
All of this work will be made infinitely more difficult if Trump is sworn in with Republicans controlling both chambers on Capitol Hill. While he has the Senate, the House may remain too close to call for several more days.
The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us. The past decade has felt like a detour from the lives and aspirations we had hoped to have. I feel a special empathy for those who came of age in the 1960s at the peak of Great Society reforms and have spent their adults lives witnessing their erosion. Those of us with an act or two left, and especially those with their whole lives still to dedicate to making America better than she is presenting right now, owe it to those whose time is ending to summon our essential optimism, roll up our sleeves, and get to down to the hard work that our current predicament demands. That may sound like a rallying cry, but I’m also trying to convince myself.
The term “lizard brain” has fallen out of use since the aughts. It was a derogatory term for describing the appeal of demagogues like Trump and the visceral impulses they harness to build mass movements. They don’t appeal to people’s frontal lobes, to their policy preferences, but to their feelings and fight-or-flight instincts. Those instincts, born of millions of years of evolution, do not always offer evolutionary advantage. Hunters and terrorists use knowledge of their quarry’s instinctive behaviors to kill more of them.
The irony of the MAGA movement and the related Q-Anon cult is how believers see themselves as the real truth-seekers. It’s the rest of us who are sheep mindlessly going where and doing what we are told. But those Americans whose instincts told them to fear dark-skinned immigrants, women, and cultural change may be about to find out how led astray they’ve been by their guts, whether they like it or not. Not that any will admit it.
