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?
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
