Two months out: 9 thoughts on the election

Every crisis is an opportunity.

Hello friends,

We’re about two months out from the election, and as far as interpreting the results, the discourse has been, well, not great.

Part of this has been due to emotional response: people across the broader left are upset, and when people are wounded it is easy for them to retreat to hobbyhorse theories and cathartic scapegoating instead of learning. Part of this is tied to the anything-goes epistemological arena generated by a major event for which we have a lot of low-quality data, and that by its nature is highly “over-determined” — that is, determined by multiple causes which could be sufficient on their own to explain what happened. And part of this is because this is a crisis, and all crises are opportunities. The old guard in the party is attempting to reconstitute itself, while challengers look to get a foothold in the market of ideas. The stakes in this debate are high.

I’m rounding up a handful of thoughts I’ve had tied to the election, and the reaction to it, with links to a few of my recent pieces.

1. The Democratic Party is caught in the “America is already great” trap. “AIAG” does not roll off the tongue, and it captures how the party has painted itself into a corner: “The Trump era has marked a reversal of the Democrats’ value proposition relative to Republicans: The Democrats now appear as defenders of society as it is, whereas the Republicans position themselves as agents of change. It is no surprise then that, as Democrats continually renege on commitments to reorganize society to make it more just, they are losing their working-class base and fighting an intensifying perception that they are a party for elites.” Read more here in my recent article.

1b. There is no claim that Democrats can make about justice or standing up for the powerless that isn't rendered meaningless or absurd by its participation in what human rights observers and scholars have identified as a genocide in Gaza. This doesn’t have a lot of explanatory power as far as the outcome of the explanation is concerned; it wasn’t a high-ranking issue for many voters. But it matters for the party going forward: for many progressives it is an unforgettable symbol of moral ruin. Moreover Democratic elites who are not ideologically committed to destroying Gaza but are willing to support its destruction in an attempt to play the game are not just morally but also politically depleted by the act. If you allow yourself to say “we stand with the little guy” while also vaporizing the little guy with the most powerful weapons on Earth, then you are losing touch with what it means to possess values. In the long term, voters can smell it. Here is my recent article about how Biden using his final days in office to try to ram through another $8 billion in arms to Israel cements his horrifying legacy.

2. The simplest proximate explanation for the pro-Trump swing is due to the long-running and deep unpopularity of the Biden administration, and a huge part of that unpopularity was tied to inflation. Inflation was a top issue for voters in the election; Trump was much more trusted than Democrats on the economy; and inflation has been lethal to incumbents across the political spectrum all over the world. The breadth of pro-Trump swings in over 90% of counties across the U.S. — including most reliable Democratic demographics — strengthens the hypothesis of widespread frustration over a universal phenomenon. Inflation cooled later in Biden’s term, but the worst inflation in over forty years appeared deeply psychologically sticky and took a significant bite out of real income growth. Moreover, Trump benefited from voters remembering his pre-Covid economy. (I am increasingly of the mind that Trump might have won re-election had it not been for Covid, and that 2020 was more of a referendum on public health crisis than character.)

The other major reason Biden was unpopular was because he was unable to do the work of trust maintenance and persuasion to counter dissatisfaction with rising prices and his age. Biden and his team deluded themselves into thinking his sweeping spending bills would speak for themselves, that the general aura of legislative accomplishment would prevail over how people claimed they felt. Biden’s disinterest in and inability to command popular attention, demonstrate his awareness of inflation, and make any kind of positive case for the future (as I wrote about here) in response to rising costs / a general appetite for economic change foreclosed his ability to win back the electorate.

3. Approach all neat theories of why Harris lost and how she could have won with extreme caution (including anything I say of course). It is a time for humility, curiosity, slow thinking. People with a sincere learning mindset use evidence to advance their arguments, attempt to posit falsifiable claims, acknowledge there were multiple paths to loss and to victory, remain open to new data, and recognize that constructing arguments about change requires substantiating what changed and how it did.

4. The narrative that “woke politics” is why Trump won is deeply unpersuasive and based on a revisionist account of the Harris campaign and the Biden era. In reality, Democrats did exactly what the anti-woke camp wanted them to do — and then still lost. I wrote an article about it here, and a thread on Bluesky, where I’m now posting more frequently, here.

5. The Democrats’ “demographics is destiny” argument, which has always been problematic, has been shattered. The left has to accept the reality that Trump’s coalition is becoming more racially diverse even as he leans into bigoted, fascistic rhetoric more than ever before. At the same time, Democrats must recognize the reductive and ultimately racist lines of thought that led many of them to think of racial minorities as single-interest groups to be won over through cultural inclusionism is misguided.

Just like white voters, voters of color think strategically, make calculations about their perceived material and ideological interests, can harbor ambivalence toward a candidate, and can of course share Trump’s worldview about minorities. The most stark example of this is the reporting I’ve read (and the many anecdotes I’ve heard) of immigrants — including undocumented ones — who favor Trump, often for economic reasons. In the cosmopolitan metropolis of New York, Trump performed better than any Republican in over a quarter century, in large part because of swings among nonwhite voters. One can choose to absorb these facts or bury one’s head in the sand. I wrote an article about it here.

6. Explaining the elections and moralizing about them are separate endeavors. Treating explanation and culpability as mutually exclusive, as many pundits have, will only cloud one’s judgment while searching for a solution.

7. The overwhelming majority of attempts to blame the media for being insufficiently anti-Trump are a sad and misguided coping mechanism. The number of online pundits and liberal activist-types on social media blaming the mainstream press for allegedly failing to sound the alarms on Trump has shocked me. For just about a decade, most centrist and left-of-center media has obsessed over the real and imagined dangers of Trump, often to the unhealthy exclusion of many other vital issues. The facts and possible dark futures that surround Trump have long been clear.

When you point out to this crowd the countless examples of mainstream media outlets covering Trump’s reactionary and authoritarian ideas, they’ll retract to a different position, arguing that these outlets failed to make them “front page” news or describe these issues urgently enough. A few things need to be said: First, “front page” is now more of a metaphor than a consequential phenomenon. There are a handful of front pages that still matter, but for the most part media is now distributed through social media, apps, newsletters, search engines, and so on. What this set really means is that all the Trump stories they care about should saturate the discourse — primarily on social media — but that’s not something newspaper editors can control. Second, hugely influential swing voters are precisely the kinds of voters who do not follow news media closely. Third, the insistence on an allegedly missing urgency in coverage — which I don’t agree with — ultimately represents a craving for media outlets as pure propaganda apparatuses. That is the responsibility of parties and activists, not journalists.

Separately: “Joe Rogan of the left” discourse is premised on a category error.

8. Dealignment, not realignment, is the watchword. Read Tim Barker’s sharp essay in The New Left Review about how it’s too early to say if the class composition of the parties has been fundamentally scrambled and that capital has things to like and disfavor in both parties. “Hegemony is more than a vibe, and critical realignment is not just a fancy name for a dramatic election night. … Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.”

9. Never underestimate the power of Trump’s jester hat. A few years ago I wrote a retrospective of the Trump presidency explaining how Trump weaponized humor in his rise to power — to claim anti-establishment credentials, entertain his base, float authoritarian ideas and provide himself with an escape hatch when people tried to hold him accountable for his most extreme ideas. Shortly before the election I wrote a brief follow-up to it that argues that Trump is still successfully doing the same thing, but this time I emphasized how his supporters are able to exploit his “unseriousness” in order to cherry-pick what they publicly claim they do and don’t support about his extremist agenda. Both Trump and his purportedly moderate supporters benefit from a refusal to traffic in committal or earnest language, which marks a degradation of democratic discourse and leaves the door open to extreme outcomes.

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