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He Owes Them

Making a comeback?

The anti-abortion activists kept their mouths shut during the election. Now they want payback:

 Anti-abortion advocates say there is still work to be done to further restrict access to abortion when Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House next year.

They point to the federal guidance that the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden released around emergency abortions, requiring that hospitals provide them for women whose health or life is at risk, and its easing of prescribing restrictions for abortion pills that have allowed women to order the medication online with the click of a button.

“Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” the Susan B. Anthony List, the powerful anti-abortion lobby, said in a statement Wednesday. “President Trump’s first-term pro-life accomplishments are the baseline for his second term.”

The group declined to release details about what, specifically, they will seek to undo. But abortion rights advocates are bracing for further abortion restrictions once Trump takes office. And some women are, too, with online abortion pill orders spiking in the days after Election Day.

Trump will never have to run again so he’s free to reward his friends without any fear of electoral repurcussions.

Time Will Tell

From Benjy Sarlin at Semafor:

We’re deep in the “bargaining” phase now, as Democrats look for coalition members to blame, positions to dump, and language to police that will win them back the millions of voters they lost across the country on Tuesday.

That’s a healthy part of any electoral loss, and it’s why we have free and fair elections — politicians only know when they touched the hot stove when voters tell them. But I’m also skeptical of almost every early explanation for Harris’ defeat I’ve seen so far that hinges on Democrats making a tweak or two and fixing their problems.

It’s not that they aren’t smart recommendations in the mix, it’s that they’re far less relevant than the likeliest factor in any Democratic turnaround: Time.

Democrats are smart to listen to the voters who rejected them and stay humble about what they might learn. But the emphasis here is “listen” — the actual answers as to what to do next will likely only reveal themselves once they see how Trump governs and how the public responds. In the meantime, there are a few reasons why they shouldn’t leap to cure-all explanations so quickly.

The issues of the next election will not be the issues of today. Amid the finger-pointing about campaign tactics, one thing everyone in both parties seems to agree on is that President Biden’s unpopularity — especially his record on inflation and immigration — was a major drag.

But those two issues will not look the same going forward, nor is it clear they’ll even be high up in the voter priority list come 2026 or 2028. Biden will be gone in January. Democrats are now relieved of responsibility of governing and free to retake the Trump role of critic-in-chief when the other side screws something up, or over-reads their mandate, or faces a no-win problem that requires upsetting some people — and they will. It’s easy to win votes on Israel, for example, when simply saying Biden’s approach is bad, with little further detail, is an appealing message to a slice of Jewish and Muslim voters. It’s harder to do that when you’re the one in charge and own the decisions.

But, of course, Israel-Gaza might not even be a significant issue in 2026. What will? It’s hard to say. Take 2004, when Democrats despaired that President George W. Bush — who also won his first election without a popular vote mandate — had found a winning combination of faith and national security voters. Almost immediately, his Social Security privatization push began dragging down his approval, and then a worsening Iraq War and a widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina dragged the party down further, then various scandals in the White House and Congress, and finally an economic collapse nobody saw coming led to a landslide. By 2006, Democrats had a unifying set of issues to run on, by 2008 they had identified a charismatic candidate who fit the moment.

This isn’t an exceptional story, it’s the typical one after every party loss: The form of their eventual comeback rarely is obvious the day after the election. And it’s rarely as simple as “Go on Joe Rogan.”

Parsing a Harris loss isn’t as easy as it looks. The Harris campaign is getting nitpicked to death in the aftermath of the election, as is natural after a loss. Some of these criticisms may prove correct, but it will also take time to identify which ones are more solidly backed by data and reporting and come up again in future elections. There are also some specific reasons to be wary of early reads on her performance.

For one, there’s a really simple problem in evaluating Harris: It’s not entirely clear her campaign was bad, or was merely doing its best in a terrible national environment she inherited at the last minute from her predecessor. In the battleground states where the campaign devoted its time, resources, and ground game the race was mostly close and turnout was stronger — while votes are still being counted, it looks like a 2-point swing would have won her the Rust Belt and the presidency, and just a little more would have added Georgia. Meanwhile, states with little attention from the campaign, like New York or Texas, swung hard to the right by much wider margins, while only a single state (Washington) appears to have moved left at all.

It strongly suggests that, like so many other incumbent parties worldwide after the pandemic, the campaign faced strong headwinds that it was unable to overcome. There was polling evidence (and yes, the polls were more accurate this time) ahead of the election that Harris campaign’s economy-focused ads at least helped mitigate her weakness on inflation, for example. Her favorables also shot up during the race, so there’s some evidence her biographical ads really did help her image. It didn’t add up to a victory, but figuring out the delta between the battlegrounds and the rest of the country, and which attacks on her stung and could sting again, is going to be a long process for Democrats.

The top of the ticket’s traits may not be transferable. One oddity of the election is that it was the most resounding Republican win in 20 years in the popular vote, including an unprecedented breakthrough with Latino voters, and yet the picture down-ballot looks much more like the status quo. Republicans are still set to win the popular vote among House candidates, but their expected majority looks narrow and Democrats held up surprisingly well in places like New York where Harris collapsed. In the Senate, up to four states may have split their tickets for Democrats — Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona — and in Pennsylvania, Sen. Bob Casey looks poised to lose by a narrow margin.

In North Carolina, Gov.-elect Josh Stein easily won his election over scandal-plagued Mark Robinson, but Democrats won key races elsewhere on the statewide ticket as well. The Republican wave was real, but relatively weak, in state legislatures around the country.

Some of this can be attributed to favorable district lines. But other elements include Republicans voting for Trump and a Democrat, or (as seems prominent in Nevada, for example) not voting for anyone at all in races down the ballot.

What does it all mean? Hard to say. But it complicates some easy takeaways that the Democratic “brand” is fatally compromised, at least for now. Contrary to popular assumptions, Trump proved uniquely popular with some voters, thanks in part to his perceived economic success in the White House, and tended to outrun others in his party. In the last nine years, no Republican has quite replicated Trump’s power in battleground races — and those who try the most typically do worse than less MAGA alternatives. Predicting how a post-Trump nominee would fare (which right now looks like JD Vance) is very hard; they might not be able to draw out his voters, they might have greater upside with voters he’s repelled, and a ton of their appeal will depend on his record in office.

Similarly, concerns voters had with Harris did not always attach themselves to other Democrats this cycle. One possible theory is that many of the attacks on cultural issues, immigration, and transgender rights that dogged her in Republican ads were largely dredged up from her presidential campaign in 2019, which came at a time when politicians with national ambitions were racing to the left. But many down-ballot Democrats either skipped that process, emerged later, or adjusted to the backlash years ago: You’ll hear a lot of criticisms about “defund the police” or saying “Latinx” on TV, but as David Weigel notes, few recent examples of actual elected Democrats using or entertaining this language.

There are difficult and divisive questions for the party ahead, like how to respond to the hundreds of millions of dollars in transgender-related ads (though some winning senators faced the same attacks), as well as Trump’s inevitable immigration crackdown. But the next round of candidates will not be so burdened by what has been — future recruits and presidential hopefuls may have more flexibility to adopt new ideas and rhetoric without a parade of clips and opposition research undermining their new message.

No one who already had an ideological nit to pick with the party will heed that advice. The people who are jockeying for power or who are angry that the campaign chose this or that tactic will make sure their thoughts are known. But the rest of us would do well to just take a beat, assess the lay of the land — and let this unfold. We can’t change what happened and Trump is going to fuck up. Those things are immutable.

At Least Go Small

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.

https://x.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1854520327302267246

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.

Post-Election Misinfo

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:

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.

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.

https://x.com/friendomedia/status/1855094923533729910

Yes, you are a conspiracy fantacist.

Readers, please don’t do this.

Friday Night Soother

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:

Lake Effect, Whiteout, and Erie were born at the Ten Lives Club location in Blasdell.

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:

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.

The Never Trumpers Make A Good Point

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:

Democray Is A Luxury?

Version 1.0.0

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.

Go Into The Wild, Democrats

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.

There Is No Price Tag

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.

Emotional Tidal Wave

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.

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