Not The Fight We Wanted Or Signed Up For But It’s The One We Got

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

The Morning After

For several months I’ve thought about what I would write for you this morning under these circumstances. As I rolled it around in my head, I kept bouncing around between capturing the emotional weight of the moment and looking ahead to what comes next. I’ll try to do both here. In doing so, I followed my usual practice of not drafting Morning Memo in advance so that it would feel fresh and immediate, not contrived or prepackaged.

What doesn’t seem warranted any longer are the warnings, alerts, and cautions about what lies ahead. You’ve heard those from me for more than a year. The whole country heard similar warnings from multiple quarters. It was loud and clear. The campaign was fought directly over the issues of democracy, rule of law, basic decency and respect, and protection for the marginalized. Those principles and values lost and lost badly.

You might be taken aback by me finding silver linings in this result but I do think there are two of them. First, the dark path ahead was chosen clearly and unequivocally: With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote. Second, Trump will win without undue reliance on the quirks of our 18th century anti-majoritarian constitutional structure.

There is clarity in that result. This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.

Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.

If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.

Political change is slow; cultural change is glacial (an anachronistic metaphor in an age of rapidly retreating ice). But it’s doable. We’ve seen remarkable cultural changes in our own lifetimes. Cultural change starts small, with the brave, resolute, and individual choices we make in our own lives and communities. It’s reflected in how we live, where we live, and what we live for. These myriad choices we make over the course of conducting our private lives speak more clearly about who we are and what we’re about than the occasional casting of a ballot in an election.

I don’t feel inspired to rally you to action quite yet, and it feels hollow to try. If you need to decompress and recover, I get it. But in our heightened emotional state this morning, some of us are going to be tempted to cast blame all around us for this electoral outcome. It might make us feel good in the moment. But if you’re looking for a political fix to the cultural problem, I’m not sure you’re going to end up fixing much of anything. Politics alone will not save us.

For those of us who believe in the rule of law, a pluralistic society, and standing up to unkind people who engage in hurting others as public blood sport, we’re going to have to take a long view toward promoting those principles in all aspects of our culture so that they are ultimately reflected in our politics in a way they simply are not now. I recognize that many of us have already been doing this slow and steady work, which makes the overnight result even more discouraging. It remains an enormous, decades-long task, but it is something each of us can engage in without uprooting our lives or changing professions or moving abroad.

None of this is to counsel abandoning politics or the public square. We need to create and sustain a cultural imperative to continue to engage in the political realm, too. The many political battles ahead are essential to fight and to fight well. We will need a fresh crop of reserves to begin to spell those who have been fighting these battles for a long time.

In past elections that led to stinging defeats, you could take some solace in knowing that the pendulum of American political life swings back and forth with some regularity. The latest reversal, while seemingly devastating, could be reversed within the span of one election cycle. We sit here this morning with justifiable fear and trepidation that the mechanisms for such reversals of fortune – free and fair elections, majority rule, the rule of law itself – may not be available to us this time.

Still, the clarity of the present moment is itself a gift. It has already given me a feeling of expansiveness from not having to engage in tiresome talk about optimal campaign messaging, or argue over the shortcomings of the Democratic Party, or spend precious time hoping, wishing, and praying that people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin will do the right thing.

I didn’t start today’s Morning Memo intending to rally you toward some vague cultural revolution, hand-waving at civic engagement and personal virtue. So let me bring this back down to earth a bit.

There is immediate and hard work to do in politics. The marginalized and the disenfranchised are always hurt first and most with the kind of upheaval that we expect to come, but it is worse this time because hurting them has been advertised as the point. People who have been doing their jobs under the rule of law and in support of democratic and civil society institutions – investigators, prosecutors, judges, the press, government workers, librarians, teachers, opposition party leaders – have been promised retribution. Protecting those under threat will be amongst the most noble work of the coming years.

The powers of federal officeholders, we have been told repeatedly and plainly, will be abused to exact revenge against perceived foes, which means anyone who presents a challenge to Trump and MAGA Republicans holding unbridled and absolute power. I take these promises at face value. Countering those efforts, upholding what’s left of the rule of law, fortifying what remains of the democratic system will be similarly noble work.

All of this work will be made infinitely more difficult if Trump is sworn in with Republicans controlling both chambers on Capitol Hill. While he has the Senate, the House may remain too close to call for several more days.

The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us. The past decade has felt like a detour from the lives and aspirations we had hoped to have. I feel a special empathy for those who came of age in the 1960s at the peak of Great Society reforms and have spent their adults lives witnessing their erosion. Those of us with an act or two left, and especially those with their whole lives still to dedicate to making America better than she is presenting right now, owe it to those whose time is ending to summon our essential optimism, roll up our sleeves, and get to down to the hard work that our current predicament demands. That may sound like a rallying cry, but I’m also trying to convince myself.

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