Member Newsletter
Our publishing interface tells me I’ve written well over 40,000 posts in just shy of 24 years doing this. The ones I remember most clearly are the ones I wrote after big electoral defeats and shocks. I think of 2004 and 2016, and then, of course, the more subsidiary setbacks. I think about what I believe people need to — or what would be helpful for them to — hear, or what scaffolding of analysis or meaning one can use to begin to construct a place to house those feelings of shock, disappointment, desolation. More than anything else I try to capture the truth of the matter as I’m able to make sense of it. Because that’s my real job.
What did this mean? Why did this happen?
The most fundamental reason is that we’re coming out of a vast, global, public crisis that began just short of five years ago. The economy was good through most of Donald Trump’s first term. The pandemic was an epochal disaster, the full impact of which I believe most of us still haven’t gotten our heads around. Then, during that and coming out of that, life become a lot harder for most people. There was a major inflation shock. Housing became much harder to afford and stepping up the housing ladder, from renting as a 20-something to owning a home as a 30-something, for example, became much harder. The pandemic crime spike was relatively short-lived, as were the worst parts of the inflation. But the reality of a destabilized society has persisted.
In my home in New York City, one of the safest big cities in the country, homelessness is much more visible. Walk into a pharmacy and half the items are under lock and key. The city feels rougher and grimmer. It feels like what it is: a city in the aftermath of a series of major public crises. The fact that the U.S. economy weathered the COVID crisis better than almost any other peer economy and has bounced back more quickly is both true and mostly beside the point in terms of the ways in which many people have experienced the last five years. Different versions of these realities are why incumbent parties of the right and left have been suffering massive electoral defeats again and again for the last three years. It’s an almost universal pattern. And now it’s happened here. The Democrats were the incumbent party and the country rejected them thoroughly.
Of course, a normal center-right party of government wasn’t on offer as the option. Donald Trump was. Many Americans like what he’s offering. As I said last night, I don’t believe that the majority of Americans want the future Donald Trump is selling. But the list of all his palpable and very visible civic evils wasn’t enough to warn voters off. He ran an openly racist and fascistic campaign and he won. And he managed to build his support among racial and ethnic minority groups. We have to see all those things for what they are.
So what now?
As I wrote last night, exhaustion is the greatest threat to continued opposition to Donald Trump. I spoke to someone over the weekend, when the outcome of the election was unkown, who said, “we were told we had to save democracy in 2020. But here we’re back having to save it again four years later. What happened?” The tenor of the conversation wasn’t focused at me. But it was very explicitly: who failed us? Who lied to us?
At that moment, I was too busy and overwhelmed with the moment to engage the conversation. But the best answer is simply that the expectations were wrong. And a good bit of that is on the people setting those expectations. It was never going to be a one and done thing. I wrote a year ago that we’re in a new era in which we have one civic democratic party and one populist autocratic party. To think the civic democratic party is going to win every time is just not a realistic expectation. None of this is to say, “well, we just have to get back at it in two and four years with the same strategies and the same people.” This result is a thorough rejection of the last four years, in many ways more this presidency than the Democratic Party itself. When I noted the global wave of anti-incumbent feelings in the post-pandemic era, I did so not to say, “well, this was preordained, it is what it is.” It wasn’t. It’s to understand the field Democrats and Republicans were playing on. But this is a rejection of the last four years. It’s a rejection of Joe Biden’s presidency. That doesn’t mean, by any means, that I think all his policies were wrong or should be abandoned. But that was the public verdict. You see it in the uniform backlash to the right almost everywhere. The one very faint silver lining is we can now see that that electoral delta, with House reps and Senate candidates running ahead of Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, was real. It was less Democrats as a whole — though it was definitely some of that too — than the people in power.
There is also a lot to absorb here about the defections of the young, racial and ethnic minorities, people’s understanding of themselves as men and women, the fragmentation of our world through social media.
But again, all this picking up the pieces, making sense of a new strategy, considering the next approach first has to grapple with that question of exhaustion. There’s no one election that saves democracy. That whole construct is wrong. It’s the enduring question of what kind of society we want to live in and what we’re going to do about it.
I just read an email from a reader who talked about commiserating with their friend group, many of whom were in the mode of “fuck it, do Project 2025, shoot for the moon, whatever, who cares.” The email got into the draw of nihilism. If you know me, you know I can’t agree with any of that. But we probably shouldn’t judge ourselves too harshly for our immediate reactions. It’s a crushing reverse. We’re entitled to our primal screams and outrage and being done with all of it.
I suspect it’s less a question than a process. We may be done with history, but history isn’t done with us.
Final point.
What is Trump’s secret power? We now have had three straight presidential elections where he managed to exceed expectations and the polls. He survives things politically no one else could. He’s survived a million things like that. What was the basis of his rise to power? It was as a reality TV star. We need to think a lot more seriously about what that means. You can combine that with the broader cult of celebrity in which he operates and excels. Things don’t stick to him or matter in the same way because a big chunk of the country sees him not as a politician but as a celebrity. We’re in a political culture where reality TV is in some sense reality. We see that in the increasingly fragmented world of social media, the openly performative nature of all of it, the visual idioms of TikTok where so many young people and communities separate from mainstream media get their news.
I don’t have a good answer here, or a suggestion of how to grapple with any of this. It’s certainly not to hire more TikTok consultants. It is more that it is clear to me that there is a whole symbolic and persuasive world of celebrity, reality TV and performative culture that is grabbing hold of our politics and that we need to understand much better. We know this world exists, of course. Most or many of us participate in it. We binge watch absurd but irresistible reality TV shows, we share memes, we know people with PhDs and fancy lawyers who love pro-wresting. But we need to think a bit more seriously about how this world has become the expressive language of politics in early 21st century America.
I’m pretty sure over the coming days and weeks and months Donald Trump and his political party will see this election as an overwhelming mandate to institute the whole MAGA agenda. That will cause a lot of chaos and public immiseration, though unevenly distributed. It will begin to drive its own public backlash. Much of the establishment media and corporate America will try to get along and go along. But some will chronicle and enumerate the toll. And within that maelstrom we will all have to decide, individually and collectively, what we’re going to do about it.