I was wrong about this election. I was wrong about a bunch of things. Maybe I erred largely on the side of hoping too much. I hoped that most people in America understood that Donald Trump was the worst candidate of our lifetimes. And as a consequence of understanding that, I hoped that most people would make the right decision for themselves, their children and their country. How wrong I was.
I don’t blame Kamala Harris. I don’t think anyone should. The vice president ran pretty much the perfect campaign, according to people who have worked with presidential nominees. In terms of policy, in terms of messaging, in terms of get-out-the-vote – it was as good as anyone could expect from a candidate who started in July. Her campaign was “all gas, no brakes.” I think she did everything she could. So did all the pro-democracy people out there. It just wasn’t enough.
We can and will argue about why this happened. Some will say that Joe Biden should have decided sooner against running for reelection. Some say that Harris didn’t take this or that policy position to appeal to this or that voting bloc. Some say that a woman, especially a biracial woman, was never going to win anyway. Some say that the Washington press corps failed to inform the electorate properly. And so on.
While all of these complaints have merit in and of themselves, I think none of them explains what happened on their own. Bottom line: most people, which is to say, most white people in this still majority-white country, wanted what Trump was offering them, even though what he was actually offering was little more than machismo and vengeance.
Trump is, as a shrewd observer put it, the whitest white man we have ever seen. That can erase a multitude of sins. “So am I to understand that leading a coup, promoting the Big Lie, being found liable for rape and guilt of fraud, growing more extreme, threatening to be a dictator and suffering dementia actually strengthened Trump politically?” David Rothkopf said. “It does not compute.” But it kinda sorta does.
If it was hard for my liberal and Democratic brethren to hear before the election, it shouldn’t be now. Lots of Americans do not believe in democracy in any universal sense. They believe in democracy that is exclusive, indeed that is punitive. Trump has promised retribution against his enemies and lots of Americans liked the sound of that.
My hope was that there were more people who wanted our democracy to be inclusive than there were those who wanted it to be exclusive. My hope was that the story of progress in America, with expanding rights and opportunities for all, would continue the way it seemed to after Joe Biden’s election. It’s moments like this, in the aftermath of a shocking election, when I find myself second-guessing such hopes.
Some are already saying that the Democrat Party needs to soul-search. The election, said Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, “was a real wake up call for Democrats. It was overwhelming. We can point to Trump’s personality, whatever you want to say, but Democrats lost a lot of the working families. We lost a lot of males — lost males of different races, color and creed. And it ought to be a wake up call, and we’ve got to be fighting for the middle class and fighting for them every day. And I think they feel like we lost sight of that.”
But I don’t think the Democrats need to change who they are and what they stand for to reach just enough white people in just enough swing states. The Biden presidency put the federal government on the side of the working and middle classes. Indeed, Biden talked endlessly about the dignity of work, a clear signal to “a lot of males.” The Harris campaign aimed to build on that by expanding Medicare, cutting taxes for families, helping small businesses grow, fighting for labor rights and so on. The Democratic Party as it stands is a multiracial party oriented economically toward everyone who works for a living.
In other words, the Democratic Party is populist in that it stands for and advances policies that are popular. The Republicans know and fear that. Otherwise, they would not have taken credit for infrastructure projects nationwide that Biden and the Democrats enacted and that nearly every congressional Republican voted against. Moreover, when pollsters ask respondents which policies they like best, majorities usually favor Democratic policies over policies that the GOP offers.
What the Democrats do not do, but that the Republicans do do, is single out to ridicule a subgroup or subculture for the purpose of making just enough white people in just enough swing states feel better about themselves. To be precise, the Democrats do not tear down immigrants or trans people or anyone to give the impression of justice being served to voters who believe that minorities are taking something from them. They do not dance around that gray area between bigotry and “the economy.” They don’t do that and never should. If they do, they will collapse, as a party, from the inside out.
But what should the Democrats do?
For now, I’ll say this: whatever they do, it had better be with the understanding that we are now living in a new age of fear, ignorance and superstition to such a staggering degree that we will go back, to paraphrase Harris, if the Democratic Party doesn’t take it seriously. Lies, propaganda and disinformation are coming from all corners of the globe, including from places like Russia, China and Iran, but the clearinghouse here is the GOP and the rightwing media apparatus.
Joe Biden and the Democrats saved the economy and made it the envy of the world. They pulled us out of a pandemic that killed a million of us. They brought prosperity back to every one of the so-called “left behind” counties. They tamed inflation post-covid without triggering a ruinous recession. But none of that mattered to swing-state voters awash in lies. The Forward’s Alex Zeldin put it this way: “If your media consumption is a Fox morning show, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, Prager, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, rightwing memes on reddit, Twitter and Instagram, and your nightly consumption is Fox, you will have no way of knowing anything good Democrats do.”
