Post-Election Reflections
When Should a Heuristic be Discarded?
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
-Abraham Lincoln
How could 75 million people have voted for a racist? A fascist? A man who seems bent on eroding democracy? If that question is troubling you right now I can set your mind at ease… but you may have to modify some of your preconceptions. THEY DIDN’T.
As
(jokingly) wrote “I can’t believe calling him Hitler didn’t work!” If you are running political and cultural software which tells you that Trump voters are all angry racists, or motivated by bitterness and resentment, or whichever other NYT headlines your mind is generating right now, you might be feeling rather bewildered. Please keep in mind: this is the same software (almost the exact same code, actually) which told you that distorting uncouth Trump quotes into death threats and eliminating context to make one of his statements sound supportive of white supremacists-these are the things that your mind told you would work. They haven’t worked. I predict that the imminent fascist coup will also not come to pass. This isn’t the end of our democracy. If I’m right then many people are wrong right now; they’re making incorrect predictions and they’re using invalid heuristics.It’s time for a reset. It’s time to ruthlessly examine our priors. This isn’t a fun process but the ability of the Democrat establishment to do this and do it well over the next year or two will determine a lot in our politics. I’m honestly not encouraged when I contemplate their written and spoken reactions heretofore.
In Postulates of Political Belief I wrote, regarding the recent past, that “political association, policy priorities, and technological progress have shifted nearly every variable. If you’re still in the same place that you were 5 years ago… then you’re in a much different place, and some re-examination is called for.”
There will be a lot of this re-examination in the near future and the biggest question in my mind is: can the Left abandon their self assurance that conservatives are primarily motivated by bigotry or resentment or sexism? (The Critical Theorists cannot, of course-they’re in their own confabulated reality of oppression hierarchies and discourses and codes). Can the Left set its moralistic (and mostly wrong) set of lenses aside for long enough to converse with other people and consider policies in terms of their real effects, and not their intentions, or fashionable ideas?
The difficult thing about political conversation is that, to engage in it in good faith you have to first admit that you might be wrong. I don’t think many educated progressives can do this. Many college educated people (even Leftists who argue against privilege and hierarchies) actually believe that they’re smarter and better (more ‘democratic’) than the hoi polloi, even on issues which are unrelated to their education or expertise (tax policy or gender or war-fighting). This kind of class-based arrogance is extremely difficult to set aside.
That is why I see MSNBC contributors telling me that Trump won because he leveraged “anger… and fear.” This after spending a solid week making spurious connections with the Nazis and desperately trying to force Trump’s words into the shape of a death threat. Anger and fear, you say? Inasmuch as this pose is artifice and a tactical stance it can be set aside. If it is a genuine pathology of mindset and personality (as I believe it largely is) it could destroy entire sections of the political wing.
Ironically the near future success of the radically egalitarian Leftists relies on their ability to admit that police officers and housewives and engineers and factory workers and soldiers might be more correct regarding policy issues and human nature than they are (i.e., might be their equals). I guess we will see…
I take a mild (and dark) pleasure in viewing the consternation and confusion of people that I consider to be opponents (like schadenfreude, but not as intense). I’m not proud of it and I actively suppress it when I’m in dialogue with others. Nothing arouses defensiveness like gloating.
Nevertheless, I have read A LOT of passages like the ones below in the past 24 hours. I find myself correcting and responding to their claims as I’m reading them. For example:
:It’s happened. And it’s bad. America has elected as president a man who doesn’t really bother hiding his authoritarianism. Again. It is alarming. And yet to give way to alarmism at a time like this is a mistake. If American democracy is to survive the test of the next four years—and no, that is not a given—it will be because we’ve understood clearly what this moment means.
To those of us raised to revere constitutional democracy, seeing millions of people line up to vote to weaken constitutional democracy will always be upsetting. Yet in voting for a candidate who promised to use the repressive power of the state to persecute and punish his political opponents, who refused to accept a previous election defeat and rails against the notion that anything lies outside the president’s powers, tens of millions of Americans have just done precisely that. It feels inexplicable.
People voted for the person YOU think will weaken constitutional democracy… but polls show that democracy was equally-or more-popular as a voting issue for Trump voters. There’s a rarely verbalized subtext here: maybe Harris’ erratic shifts on more or less every issue, her anti-democratic selection, her impenetrable conversational ambiguities seemed like possible liabilities for democracy? More to the point, perhaps her connection to the party which pushed COVID totalitarianism, suppression of online speech, political uses of federal agencies, and racial ‘equity’ as an organizing principle, convinced voters that HARRIS was the threat to democracy, despite all of the selectively-edited video clips?
After all, what would you say to someone who told you you had voted for ‘poverty and crime and war’? You would demur, I imagine. So would they. They just don’t write down their opinions for a living.
writes:[T]he argument that democracy is on the ballot simply does not seem to work. The reason for that is not just that people care more about pocketbook issues like inflation or that incumbents have in general had a bad run of late. It’s that they don’t trust Democrats on the issue of democracy much more than they do Republicans. According to one exit poll in Pennsylvania, three out of four voters in the state believe that democracy in the United States is threatened; among those who do, it was Trump, not Harris, who had the edge.
As I was just saying…
According to
:[W]e must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms."
Those ‘institutional leaders’ tended to be quiet and cowardly when the moment came to stand up on behalf of sense or institutional integrity or even just personal loyalty. Their ineffectual muteness and assent corrupted company after company and school after school. We’ve been watching it happen for a decade now. Perhaps they feared the rightwing threat so much that they chose not to openly support their friends or advertise their convictions? I rather think they were just small and career-obsessed cowards whose credentials mattered more to them than their souls.
Freddie DeBoer:
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.
You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again.
Freddie DeBoer hits the bull’s eye… as usual. His viewpoint on this event comes from a vastly different vantage point than mine, but the symptoms of the illness are obvious to all those with eyes to see.
Then again, some (most) aren’t ready or able to face the possibility of the reality which I see.
On MSNBC.com, under a farcical article about “gerrymandered” and “voter-suppressed” Florida, is an equally fanciful opinion piece by Katelyn Burns. Just an aside: Trump won the popular vote by like 10 points in Florida-gerrymandering is not an issue here (or anywhere in a presidential race) and there haven’t been any allegations of voter suppression in my lifetime. It’s purely a rhetorical device, a mantra to soothe the progressive mind. Katelyn writes:
Anti-trans rhetoric was an alarmingly prominent part of Trump’s campaign. Fear-mongering around the issue is highly effective and also wildly out of proportion, given less than 1% of Americans identify as trans.
“Trump’s campaign and pro-Trump groups spent an estimated $95 million on ads, more than 41 percent of which were anti-trans,” PBS reports. That's right — 41%, an astounding number. And it also leaves many trans people — such as myself — feeling terrified this morning. I am privileged enough to live in a solidly blue state in which laws regarding gender-affirming health care are enshrined, but we also have to contend with the reality that the rules of the game are going to look very different under Trump and his love of fascistic politics, which is, among other things, built around the persecution of minorities.
Even if I am lucky enough to not be directly impacted in my state by Trump’s vehement anti-trans ideology, his rhetoric and policies will likely preclude my visiting a lot of the rest of the country. In some ways being trans is analogous to how red states have become unsafe for pregnant people.
The very framing of this article (“anti-trans”, “pregnant people”, “unsafe”) automatically make it invalid in the eyes of conservatives. Arguments and ads attacking gender ideology aren’t ANTI-TRANS. That’s just something you’ve taken to calling them to bolster your own position, using the groups and their members as a kind of shield to protect your favored policy goals.
This is what I mean: these people will have to amend their ideas and their self-conception in order to communicate with outsiders, or they will surely continue to decline. If I was Republican I would be gleefully egging these people on right now: “Yes! That’s right. Make everything about gender… and race! Maybe mention micro-aggressions?”
Why did 45% of women (and certainly millions of self-identified queer people) vote for an anti-trans candidate who’s striving to make pregnancy unsafe? Easy-they didn’t.
Lastly I’d like to note the phenomenon of social media influencers (even fitness or beauty models, plus many more I’m sure) endorsing candidates, apparently under the mistaken impression that anyone wonders or cares about their political leanings. MANY young ladies on Instagram have posted ever more urgent and strident pro-Harris material (mostly; there has been some Trump content) as the election neared-as if the success of the campaign depended solely on the widespread distribution of photos of pretty 26-year old Latinas wearing ‘Harris’ shirts. I only mention these examples because they are accessible to me and extremely numerous. It turns out that I follow a number of young ladies on social media. I don’t follow them for political advice, though. I would venture to guess that no one does.
Ah for the days when celebrities had the humility to know the limitations of their worldviews (a bit more than they do now, apparently), and the sense to avoid self-righteousness, and the self-interest to avoid pointless opining and division.
The reason I include these case studies, such as they are, is their pure and unself-conscious certainty. These people essentially know nothing about politics or economics or foreign policy… yet they absolutely certain they are on the right side. This condition seems like an epidemic in the modern world. People absolutely enraged (or enraptured) about issues, about which they know nothing. This tendency naturally bleeds over into the presidential election. How could anyone decline to vote for Harris? After all, the other side just fears strong women, right? I’m not sure. Let’s ask them.
“Lmao”
Some of the MANY social media images and memes I’ve encountered:
Agreed. I don’t think most Trump voters would argue with this. It’s simply irrelevant.
Weak men are afraid of strong everyone (more so strong men, I would guess)… but (statistically speaking) most of the ‘strong men’ in the United States voted for Trump. What does that do to your heuristic?
I don’t think any Trump voters define their choice in this way. This is simply using some florid and dramatic details to define a candidate… like saying voting for Hillary Clinton was a vote for a “corrupt and war-mongering sociopath.” It’s all about framing.
So… not ‘unity’ or national healing then?
And yet… he is.
You get the idea.
In many ways, and among many folks, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the level of certainty and moral fervor and the level of available policy knowledge. I would never point that out to these women though. That would be mansplaining.
That’s about all I have today. We all exist in our little digital bubbles but some parts of the political spectrum seem more bubble-bound than others. Imagine it: in the age of social media the factors which ultimately redeem our democracy turn out to be common sense and a decent regard for opinions of others… right alongside contact with the REAL world. I can’t wait to see the meme for it!
In the final analysis a baby hippo in Thailand proved more prescient than 85% of America’s professional pollsters-a perfect allegory for our time!
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For my British and European friends who are "shocked" and "surprised", here are 10 reasons you didn't see this coming. Read this short post and then read the replies from our American friends who will confirm what I'm saying.
1. Americans love their country and want it to be the best in the world. America is a nation of people who conquered a continent. They love strength. They love winning. Any leader who appeals to that has an automatic advantage.
2. Unlike Europeans, Americans have not accepted managed decline. They don't have Net Zero here, they believe in producing their own energy and making it as cheap as possible because they know that their prosperity depends on it.
3. Prices for most basic goods in the US have increased rapidly and are sky high. What the official statistics say about inflation and the reality of people's lives are not the same.
4. Unlike you, Americans do not believe in socialism. They believe in meritocracy. They don't care about the super rich being super rich because they know that they live in a country where being super rich is available to anyone with the talent and drive to make it. They don't resent success, they celebrate it.
5. Americans are the most pro-immigration people in the world. Read that again. Seriously, read it again. Americans love an immigrant success story. They want more talented immigrants to come to America. But they refuse to accept people coming illegally. They believe in having a border.
6. Americans are sensitive about racial issues and their country's imperfect history. They believe that those who are disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth should be given the opportunity to succeed. What they reject, however, is the idea that in order to address the errors of the past new errors must be made. DEI is racist. They know it and they reject it precisely because they are not racist.
7. Americans are the most philosemitic nation on earth. October 7 and the pro-Hamas left's reaction shocked them to their very core because, among other things, they remember what 9/11 was like and they know jihad when they see it.
8. Americans are extremely practical people. They care about what works, not what sounds good. In Europe, we produce great writers and intellectuals. In America they produce (and attract) great engineers, businessmen and investors. Because of this, they care less about Trump's rhetoric than you do and more about his policies than you do.
9. Americans are deeply optimistic people. They hate negativity. The woke view of American history as a series of evils for which they must eternally apologise is utterly abhorrent to them. They believe in moving forward together, not endlessly obsessing about the past.
10. America is a country whose founding story is one of resistance to government overreach. They loathe unnecessary restrictions, regulations and control. They understand that freedom comes with the price of self-reliance and they pay it gladly.
Inshallah this will be my last piece on elections or partisan politics in awhile! There are other things I want to write about: Queer Theory, mental healthcare, theodicy… and fiction.
Thank you for reading everyone. I’m deeply grateful.
This is not the end of the world, or the end or history, or the end of the US. This is the end of a political era in which a peculiar ideology took hold of too many of America's institutions, including higher education, publishing and the media. Whether you call this ideology "woke-ism" or "identity synthesis", as Yascha Mounk does, it is over - and not a moment too soon. People were warned that a backlash was coming. They did not listen. This is the result.