Still Processing the Day Before Yesterday

Yesterday I did as I have regularly done for 16 years now, and replaced my Wednesday morning, post-Election Day classes with an open conversation, to which I invited any and all who are interested, from around Friends and throughout Wichita and beyond. I’ve had some real successes, I think, with these post-election forums—both in terms of just responding to students’ questions about election minutiae as well as in providing an opportunity for people to vent—but yesterday’s couldn’t have gone better. For close to three hours, going into and through the lunch hour, over 40 students, former students, faculty, administrators, friends, and a couple of television journalists shared thoughts, ideas, concerns, and—in the case of multiple individuals—despair. (The queer students and first-generation immigrants who talked about feeling less safe in an America that has just returned to the White House a man whose campaign regularly promulgated lies about their communities were particularly poignant.)

Processing despair is something I’m seeing all around me, as well as within myself. Donald Trump will be president, will almost certainly never face justice for his crimes and unconstitutional actions, and will be able, with the strong support of a party which, despite its own divisions (and, I still suspect, to its own eventual corruption), will unitedly assist him in pursuing—or, more accurately, get his lackadaisical approval to present in his name—policies that I consider harmful and wrong. That’s depressing, and there are millions of people feeling that depression right now, including people I love dearly. What all of their processing of these depressing facts will lead to remains to be seen. Everyone shares social media stories about people planning to leave the country after an electoral defeat which they find appalling, but in this case I do know one person actively working in that direction, convinced as he is that Trump is going to lay the foundations of an undemocratic, authoritarian state that we won’t be able turn back from.

I don’t think that’s likely, but I do think it’s possible. I also think that the best way to deal with such possibilities is to involve oneself—or, if you’re already involved, get involved even more—with one’s local community, culture, service opportunities, and politics. So today I went to another meeting about parking in downtown Wichita, got into some entirely graspable, non-theoretical, non-fascist arguments with local leaders and others whom I both agree and disagree with (many of whom surely voted for Trump), and it was wonderful. No doubt I’ll once again have something to say about it all soon.

In meantime, I’m an extrovert—I process through talking, writing, sharing thoughts and worries and ideas—as well as a political nerd, and so I have thoughts about Tuesday, beyond my early morning reflections from yesterday. None of them are original, but I may be able to suggest some additions or comparisons to or among them. Basically, I am seeing four main lines of argument emerging among the hot-takes and the as-yet-incomplete electoral and exit polling and survey data out there, at least among the actually serious pundits and observers I follow. The goal is to account for the electoral reality that was clear by late Tuesday night: that support for Donald Trump and the Republicans increased has increased (in general overall, save with white women, but especially among Hispanic men) and that support for the Democratic coalition, under the leadership of Kamala Harris, dropped dramatically (particularly among self-defined Independents).

First, there is the anti-establishment/anti-incumbent/anti-government argument, expertly expressed by my old friend Damon Linker here. Basically, we see throughout the world a profound distrust in all governing institutions and in anyone who defends or seems to represent those governing institutions. Which means that meaning that Harris’s affirmation of Biden’s government programs, her invoking the support of established institutional bodies or agencies or leaders, or her trying to rile people up by accusing Trump (accurately!) of attacking said institutions and programs, just can't capture as many votes as people thought it might (particularly on the basis of the apparent effectiveness of that argument for Biden in the 2022 midterms).

Second, there is the economic argument. So many people have either explicit or, more commonly, vague concerns about their own economic prospects or stability (remember that most people who report concerns about the economy also report that they are personally doing okay), particularly as regards big ticket items--buying a house, paying for college, surviving surgery—that inflation-inflected costs which are, both historically and comparatively, manageable  (gas and food prices) are legitimately magnified in peoples' (particularly low income or entrepreneurial/self-employed peoples') minds, and thus economic worries punch above their weight.

 Third, there is the racism and sexism argument, in all its varieties (though I like the way Tom Nichols expressed it here). One doesn’t have to believe that the majority, or even a plurality, of Trump voters are committed white supremacists to recognize that the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to voting against their own partisan socialization and/or social group when given a message they like or at least are okay that is expressed by an older white male just might be larger than the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to doing the same when the message is expressed by a black female. The messenger matters, in other words.

Fourth, the structural or small-d democratic argument, which Ezra Klein partly makes here. The argument is that, when Biden declared that he was running for re-election after the 2022 midterms, certain restrictions were locked in as far the Democratic party was concerned. There was no Democratic primary, which had two results: 1) it provided the Republicans with an actually persuasive (even if duplicitous) argument that the Democratic nominee had never won an election on her own, thus undermining, particularly among low-information voters, arguments against Trump's authoritarianism, and 2) it robbed Harris and the Democrat party itself of all the procedural campaign advantages (name recognition, position polishing, candidacy distinguishing, etc.) which come along with the way general elections operate in the United States. In lacking this, Harris went into a profoundly shortened general election (and it’s worth noting that almost no one who is actually experienced in presidential campaigns thinks her team actually failed to make the best of a bad situation) without a strong positive message that fit the mood of the electorate she actually needed to win.

All of these are obviously true to one degree or another, and there are different ways in which we can see them amplifying one another. For example, the one might argue—as both Chris Hedges and David Brooks have argued, though in very different ways—that the lack of any kind of genuinely radical, Sanders-esque, and therefore “disruptive” economic proposals to addresses the immense costs of housing, medical, tuition, etc., coming from the Harris campaign, made it easier for Trump to claim the mantle of the person with the true “challenge the status quo” economic plan, thus covering both arguments #1 and #2. (Yes, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were both truly impressive progressive accomplishments, but their very lack of visibility strengthened the ease to which voters, if they even knew about these laws, would have considered them—not unreasonably—as just more of the usual tweaks to an economic system whose fundamental unfairness cannot be denied.) And that’s just one example of the ways all these diagnoses, as well as others that, as the election analysis continues on, are bound to emerge. other ways of processing this massive (though, actually, in terms of the number of people who actually voted in the election, maybe not actually quite “massive”) failure will emerge.

Will it turn out to have been a realignment election? I am instinctively doubtful, partly because I’m not sure the comparatively smaller number of people who actually voted in the election justifies such a broad conclusion, and also because last time I thought so I turned out to be quite wrong. So I hold to that possibility—the hope that Trump is something which, for all the harms I believe his administration will cause, both at home and abroad, to our economy and our foreign policy but maybe most of all to our once-actually-striving-to-be democratic political culture, we will live through, and find some new, probably much diminished, but still worthwhile ordinary politics on the other side. That is what gives my frustrated, still-processing brain a little bit of peace, at least; maybe it will to others as well.