We Probably Should Have Expected This
Nothing hits like the bitter truth after months of wish-casting
Like many Americans, I’m not having a whole lot of luck falling asleep tonight.
In the wake of Trump’s victory, there will be many attempts to assign blame. I will take part in that here, because there is blame to go around. But over and above all else I have gradually found it much more reliable to cast blame on voters rather than leaders. This is less fashionable, but I believe this makes sense, given that voters are the ones who pick the leaders. For all the complaints about the absence of third parties in our system, all that would actually need to happen for them to become relevant is for people to vote for them. For the most part, they don’t. And the truth is, whatever the Democrats could or should have done differently to point the way, the voters made an exceptionally stupid decision last night. Ultimately, these people are adults, despite our tendency to talk about them like they’re children. Failing to recognize the overwhelming stupidity and fickleness of the American electorate is just as blinkered and irresponsible as failing to recognize failures on the part of the Democrats themselves. It’s not elitist to point out the obvious.
In retrospect, it now seems very plausible that Trump was always favored to win. He was favored to win in 2016 because people hated the establishment, and he represented a disruption. I think that basically never changed. It would have re-elected him in 2020, but he was defeated not by Joe Biden, but by COVID-19.
This proved to be a double-edged sword, as Biden thus had to take the brunt of the blame for the unavoidable economic consequences of the pandemic. This cycle, Trump was favored to win because of post-COVID inflation (largely caused by spending that occurred under his own administration, funnily enough), a huge wave of illegal immigration, and the one constant of all of these elections: people on all sides of the political spectrum really fucking hate Democrats. This has certainly gotten worse over the Biden years, particularly as Elon Musk has bought Twitter and subsequently gone full MAGA, turning the platform into a firehose of right-wing propaganda.
It is certainly true that the response of Democrats mattered-they genuinely did botch border policy until the tail end of Biden’s term, an inexplicable self-own that is proving to have historic implications. And, of course, there was the inexcusably stupid and self-indulgent display of running an elderly man clearly unfit to serve another term. Still, I think the results we are seeing suggest that these mistakes were not decisive-at current count, Donald Trump is beating Harris in the popular vote by over 5 million votes, only a bit less than the margin by which he lost to Joe Biden, and 2 million more than the margin by which he lost to Hillary Clinton. He may close that gap, or it may widen a bit, but regardless, the Democrats would almost certainly have lost regardless of this or that individual fuck up. Given the Republican electoral college advantage, the question wasn’t “whether,” but “how badly?”
In truth, the theory that Americans are “exhausted by division” and want a “return to normalcy” proved only half-true: they wanted a return to normalcy insofar as they remember the Trump years as having been normal-ish, and they want an end to division by electing a Republican government that can marginalize its opposition. The common denominator is that the one thing most Americans could agree on was that Democrats aren’t getting the job done.
Democrats could have done at least one thing to mitigate this ongoing issue, which was to effectively counter the narrative that they represented the establishment party. Obviously this is possible-it’s exactly what Trump did for the Republicans. Perhaps they could have evened the scales by actively repudiating progressives, acknowledging the mistakes of the past, and, as much as I hate to say it, being a bit more, well, Trumpy: off-the-cuff, unrehearsed, risk-taking. That doesn’t mean lying their asses off like Trump does, but it does mean saying what they actually think a bit more often, including about the progressive wing that has been dragging them down for three cycles now.
I don’t buy the narrative floating around that this would have saved them this time around-I really think the centrifugal force of the economy and immigration would have been nearly impossible to overcome. But it is on the list of must-do tasks if they want to recapture power any time soon, and it’s one they are hopefully learning, albeit 8 years too late. Hopefully they get the chance to fix their mistakes.