An incomplete survey of opinion in the hours and days after the election about why the Democrats lost and how they should change course.
The last time Trump won, Democrats responded in two ways: introspection and #resistance. Introspection quickly took a back seat to resistance, beginning with the massive “pussy hat” march on Washington. Resistance seems to have done nothing for the party’s ability to win elections, so I’m hoping this time my party will take introspection a bit more seriously and it might lead to some changes and future electoral victories.
David Brooks' Wednesday column in the New York Times, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” provides a 40-year history of Reagan-inspired neoliberalism that led to the decline of the working class and has culminated in the “Trump Era.” He argues that it makes perfect sense that decent people would want to overturn that regime, even if it means voting for a “monstrous narcissist.” The column agrees with much of what I’ve been saying and writing about, mostly on this blog, since 2016 and as recently as Sunday.
Somewhat shockingly both Brooks and Ezra Klein joined Jacobin and others in seeing a missed opportunity in Democrats’ rejection of Bernie Sanders-style populism. Brooks:
My initial thought is that I have to re-examine my own priors. I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.
The success of so many pro-worker referendums in Trump voting states on Tuesday— raising minimum wages, requiring paid sick leave, banning anti-union practices—suggests there may be something to this view.
The opposing view among left-leaning pundits, like Ta-Nehisi Coates after 2016 and Carlos Lozada on Wednesday attribute Trump’s win to an evil American electorate.
Atlantic writer Tom Nichols articulated this view Wednesday when he dismissed all the rational possible reasons for casting a Trump vote, including “economic anxiety.” Policy, he says, didn’t matter. Voters hostile to democracy, impervious to facts and reason, and driven by “racial grievances” liked Trump’s anger and “promises of social revenge” and are looking forward to the continuation of a “nonstop reality show of rage and resentment.” He continued:
Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.
The problem with this view is that it suggests there’s no point in even trying to win the next election through the normal means of democratic politics. It reflects a certain type of anti-politics, which I consider to be at the root of our public dysfunction.
In short, Nichols would deposit 73 million of our fellow citizens into Hillary Clinton's basket of irredeemable deplorables.
Politics is not the place to make moral judgements of the voters. Leave that to St. Peter. Politics is simpler—it’s about getting more of them to vote with you—and your moral judgements will only get in the way of that.
In a Wall Street Journal column, a former Democratic voter, Ann Bauer, said her Republican vote was less for Trump than against woke “shaming rituals” and “the hectoring superiority,” of “the people who told us we were too stupid to understand, or too racist, too sexist, too self-hating, too similar to Nazis.”
The hectoring shamers probably didn’t realize they were advancing Trump’s political fortunes, but they were. Danielle Allen’s theory of citizenship says that daily interactions among citizens of different classes and races and political inclinations have an important impact on politics in establishing trust within the electorate. Shaming surely feeds polarization. Read about her theory of “political friendship” here.
(Also, my Defense of MAGA voters)
Predictably, the Wall Street Journal argues that the Democrats lost because they are too far left—both on cultural and economic issues—and too aggressive about it. A board editorial decried “Bidenomics,” “lawfare,” “cultural imperialism,” “regulatory coercion,” and talk of killing the filibuster (As someone with family members on Obamacare, I’m very happy for the filibuster right now). The call for moderation was echoed—also predictably—by Matt Bennett over at the Clinton-Democrat centrist think tank, Third Way.
Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel put her finger on a different Democratic weakness. The liberal media bubble, she said, pushed a “narrative of fantasy” through the 2024 election season, reporting uncritically on Biden administration denials of the president’s cognitive decline and shielding the party from an accurate view of the “mood and worries of the country.” This view reflects what Ruy Teixiera and John Judis identify in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? as two things that drag down the party: the Fox News fallacy and the Shadow party.
(The WSJ presented Democrat Teixeira's election reaction in this profile. He seems to echo the pro-Bernie sentiment seen elsewhere, calling him the "last of the classic Democrats whose main center and focus was the working class" and criticizing Clinton for running "to his left on cultural issues.")
The socialist magazine Jacobin agreed that the focus on identity politics, e.g. “white dudes for Harris,” hurt Democrats, who have become a party of, by and for elites. They helped raise a whopping $1 billion for her campaign, but also “marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class . . . largely uninterested in material questions,” Matt Karp writes.
Daniel Finn noted the outsized influence of Mark Cuban and other billionaire donors on the campaign. They got Harris to water down her plan to crack down on price gouging (leaving her with no other way to address inflation), promise to less zealously enforce anti-trust laws, and reject Biden’s plan to raise the capital gains tax.
Branko Marcetic noted that Harris was offering a $25,000 give-away to people in the position to buy a home, but had nothing to say about rising evictions and homelessness, the record number of cost-burdened renters, stagnation of median income below the 2019 level, and rising inequality and poverty—especially among children.
A type of explanation that absolves Harris and the Democrats might be called structural determinism. Conditions were ripe for a Republican victory and impossible to defy. In “How Donald Trump Won Everywhere,” Derick Thompson argues that Nov. 5 was America’s “second pandemic election.” The pandemic was a traumatic event that inevitably led to the defeat of the incumbent party in 2020. This outcome was a response to the trauma of the COVID economic aftershock—the inflation caused by supply-chain disruptions and increases in government spending during the pandemic.
“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... 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.”
The Democratic Party operatives on “Pod Save America” used a similar argument to say that Harris actually did a good job of persuading voters to support her, noting that more blue voters moved to Trump in non-swing states where Harris didn’t campaign than in battle-ground state where she did.
If Thomson can be referred to as a structural determinist, Nichols might be considered a moralist, and Coates a defender of identity politics. The Wall Street Journal provides a conservative interpretation, but so too do the Democrats at Third Way.
The class-first interpretation at Jacobin and elsewhere is usually linked to an anti-identity politics view.
After the election, Mr. class first himself, Bernie Sanders, who had worked out a fragile accommodation with identitarians (despite their attacks on him in 2016), seemed to make a clean break with them on Wednesday for the first time (as far as I know), according to a comment to the New York Times:
“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”
When it comes to waging culture war, the Republicans—predictably—have brought a gun to the Democrats’ knife fight. Where left wing cancellations involve private actions—social ostracism or firings—right wingers are wielding the power of the state to push their cultural agenda and punish culture heretics. In Texas, for example, Republicans have passed laws that encourage citizens to report neighbors, parents, librarians, and teachers, who promote or assist transgender therapy, abortion, or critical race theory. One law even offered a $10,000 bounty to anyone who sues a fellow-citizen who “aids or abets” abortion. Conservatives have been the masters of cancellation and censorship throughout American history. In the 19th century South, pro-slavery conservatives exiled opponents of slavery like the Grimke sisters and banned abolitionist literature from the mails. And they updated those practices for the 20th century during the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s. [Texas information based on reporting in the November Atlantic]
In “Whither Woke?” I entered the debate among some progressives about whether we have reached and passed “peak woke” and if the left was abandoning identity politics. The New York Times ran a piece on this question after my post, so in “Scoop!” I connected claims in their article to some of the pieces I’ve been working on this fall on the subject.
All of the above interpretations—including mine—tend to reflect assumptions the authors held before the election took place. It will take some weeks before the best exit polling data is released. Keep your eye out for that, at Catalist and Pew.
fabulous
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