Things Best Said By Others

The best takes on the election so far

I thought I'd take a second to highlight some of the best takes I've read so far about the past election. While most writing is just the same old tired cliches and shallow copycat analysis, I thought these columns offered something more.

Fortunately, these links appear not to be paywalled (for me, at least), so I encourage you to not just read these excepts, but the whole thing. All emphasis is mine unless noted otherwise.

The first is the best take I think I've read anywhere so far about the election. The article describes two key voting blocks in the American electorate: The hobbits and the nihilists, and claims that both have flocked to the Republican side in this election. I suspect the nihilist sentiment he describes is present in a lot of people across the ideological divide this days, including many people who read my site:

“Hobbits are those who did not bother to learn about politics and therefore vote in full ignorance.” According to multiple studies, most Americans cannot name the three branches of government, do not understand elementary facts of history, and can’t name more than one right in the U.S. Constitution.

The hobbits are a large force. Their electoral calculus...amounts to nothing more than a feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. If they like how things seem to be going, they vote for the party in power. If not, they vote for the challenger. There is little to no effort to understand why things are going a certain way, who is responsible, and who/what might reverse it. Because of inflation, the Democrats lost the hobbits.

The other constituency is worth closer study. It is the nihilists...[who] now menace the millions of Americans who still value civic virtue, the enforcement of ethics in politics, and basic decency.

In his 1992 much-discussed book The End of History and the Last Man, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote that the danger facing liberal democracy, even after its post-Cold War ascendency, was that without a common enemy, liberal democracy would turn on itself. Its participants would come to view each other as enemies. The implosion would not be caused by ideology but by psychological motives.

In what could read as an analysis of the 2024 election result, Fukuyama warned:

“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”

Fukuyama sounds another alarm, “Modern thought raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom.”

There is a death wish prevalent in nihilist America. Many people have turned against their society out of boredom and alienation and appear to derive pleasure from imagining—and now inviting—its destruction. The institutions and norms that led to a society of unrivaled wealth, stability, and freedom are no longer animating forces to half of the electorate...It is because of the death wish that Trump’s lack of character, morality, and respect for our norms did not cost him the election. Millions of Americans either despise those pillars or don’t consider them real, just another phony, theatrical exercise inherent in the devious racket...

Because of the death wish and the nihilism of the moment, Harris’s campaign of joy did not resonate. Joy does not describe the electorate’s prevailing mood. Instead, it is free-floating rage. They know little about “the system” but believe it is corrupt. They know little about politicians but feel they are all dishonest, incompetent, and self-serving. The unfocused rage makes them think everything is worsening, creating a vague nostalgia for a romanticized, non-existent past...Because of the psychodynamics that Fukuyama describes, Harris’s policies regarding first-time home buyers, small business startups, the cost of prescription drugs, and eldercare...failed to generate enthusiasm or even interest. After all, if the system is corrupt, it is better to place your hopes in a criminal than someone who acts as if everything is legit...

How Francis Fukuyama and “The Big Lebowski” Explain Trump’s Victory (Washinton Monthly)

The last line above is a perfect segue into the next column. The idea of placing your faith and hopes in a criminal—in a “mob boss”—is the subject of this next column. In this view, being on the “inside” of the Trump crime family provides a sense of refuge and belonging in a world that seems increasingly impersonal. Trump supporters want to be on the “inside” of a movement, even if it’s a violent, fascist one because, after all, if society is to be a war of all against all, you want to end up on the winning side:

Resistance Libs like to say, “Trump is a sociopathic gangster.” Pro-Trump swing voters respond, “Yes, exactly!”

Trump talks and acts like a mafioso. He’s not trying to hide it…. “This is how things work.” Everything’s a racket: You’re either on the outside, a chump, or on the inside, making it…What Trump offers is the clubbiness of the mob for the masses. He offers a big hug and a kiss. He brings you into his “family”… He’s “the guy who does bad things but does them on behalf of the people he represents.” He might kick the shit out of the other guy, but to you, the guy on his side, he’s warm, gregarious, and fun: he winks and slaps you on the back. For these voters, the “system” has failed, so we need Trump…

But what is the system? Basically all the universalistic promises of liberal democracy, be they the notion of the rule of law, formal political equality, or market exchange.

In all of those frameworks, individuals are supposed to encounter other individuals as free and equal citizens endowed with the same inalienable rights. A harmonious society supposedly develops from the interplay of their diverse interests. But what if it doesn’t? As Marx once pointed out, in capitalist society, “under [the] “rule of law”, the law of the jungle lives on under a different guise.”

To many, life feels more like a continuous struggle for survival rather than a social contract providing for reciprocal rights and obligations. Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” What Trump says, in effect, is, “There is no such thing as society. There are rackets. And I can help you get in on one.” And, as a corollary, “There are no contracts. There’s what you can get away with.”

Even if society is not experienced as a daily war of all against all, it can still be lonely, alienating place, where atomized subjects seek out small advantages and find little in the way of warmth or solidarity. With the failure of impersonal social agencies, people want to return to personal rule. Trumpism offers the appearance of a solution: Rackets don’t just take care of the material wellbeing of the insiders, they are always also sources of recognition and belonging. You’re part of the clan, the crew, the family.

The “fuck you” of Trumpism, its “shock to the system,” might appear to be purely anti-social, a rejection of the reciprocal norms that make cooperative social life possible, but it’s in point of fact pre-social, it speaks to the longing to a return to something earlier, “the original closeness of blood,” something more organic than society: the gang, the mob, la famiglia — to Gemeinschaft...

Although on the surface there might seem to be a big split between those who view Trump as racketeer, as Al Capone, the bandit king, and those who hope for him to become a Caesar, Duce, or Führer, but they are essentially the same phenomenon. The fascist chieftain says to his subjects, “This world of advancing civilization through free trade, international organizations, agreements, and cooperation, or that of socialism, with its brotherhood and the solidarity of man, these are all lies, designed to fool you. Here’s the truth: There’s our kind of people, and then there’s their kind of people, and we will make sure to get ours—at their expense.”

The Shadow of the Mob

This need to belong may be why “blood and soil” ideologies have become so popular all of a sudden, even in a nation of immigrants. People are desperate to be part of something. If you are a special “chosen” person because you're white, or rural, or Christian, or male, or blue-collar, then that gives you this sense of belonging and purpose. You’re unique. You’re special.

That's also the focus of this article (from 2022) talking about the so-called New Right. What’s interesting is that it quotes Leo Strauss expressing pretty much the exact same sentiment as Francis Fukymama did in the quote above. When people feel safe and bored, they will violently turn against society in a nihilistic effort to feel some sense of struggle. I know Ran Prieur has frequently talked about the effect of too much comfort and safety and the need for excitement, even if it means irrationally burning everything down:

[T]he new right can be viewed as a negative image of the woke left. Both movements invoke a favored cohort of the truly disadvantaged. In practice, they're more attentive to the anxieties of what George Orwell called the "lower-upper-middle class" — in updated terms, the journalists, academics, and other "knowledge workers" whose expectations outstrip their income.

On the left, that encourages a fixation on symbolic diversity, student debt, radical police reform, and other issues that are distant from the actual concerns of the poor and racial minorities. On the right, it leads to otherwise perplexing obsessions with content moderation on social media, bodybuilding, and other displays of flamboyant manliness and obscure theological doctrines.

You can acknowledge the tensions between the nominal goals of extremist youth movements and their underlying inspiration without dismissing them as poseurs or fools. Moralistic tendencies dominate precisely because they're not driven by outright material deprivation. The appeal of the new right doesn't lie in its policy proposals, which range from sketchy to fanciful. It lies in the ability to tell a sweeping story about what's worth fighting for, why it's so elusive, and who is to blame.

Early in 1941, the German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss delivered a consideration of the generational appeal of the far-right to his colleagues on the faculty of the New School for Social Research. Drawing on his experiences as a young intellectual in the 1920s and early '30s, Strauss argued that opposition to the Weimar Republic among his educated contemporaries was essentially a protest against the formless boredom of modern life. Assured of survival without enjoying real security and lacking causes to inspire sacrifice, "young nihilists" turned not only against liberal democracy but against civilization itself.

In the lecture on "German nihilism," Strauss suggested that this energy could have been diverted from its rendezvous with National Socialism by more skillful education, particularly in ancient philosophy. I have always found this conclusion dubious. The yearning for risk and commitment he describes can only rarely be satisfied in the library or classroom...

The new right isn't conservative. They don't want to be. (The Week)

Joseph Stiglitz repeats what is a common refrain I've seen almost everywhere in the election’s aftermath, including most prominently from Bernie Sanders: that it was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberal economics that supposedly caused the working class to abandon the Democrats and vote for Republicans, rather than inflation or culture war wedge issues:

The tragedy is that Americans seem to have voted for mere disruption more than anything else. Stalked by economic precarity and the spectre of downward social mobility, tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump as a way of “sticking it to the establishment”, and because many seem to believe that he has their back.

He doesn’t. Trump’s first term and his 2024 election campaign made it abundantly clear that he has no intention of enacting the types of policies that ordinary Americans need. He favours tax cuts for billionaires and corporations; an end to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare); and sweeping tariffs, which are effectively a tax on US consumers and businesses. Most likely, the tariffs will be riddled with corrupt exceptions bought by campaign contributions; and in any case, they are sure to provoke retaliatory measures and a loss of American jobs...his proposed solutions would be disastrous for the US economy and the world. The extent to which his voters understood this is unclear. Most seem to have been drawn to the political theatre. They wanted to send a message of dissatisfaction, and now they have done so...

Americans, it seems, have lost trust in their institutions and the belief that government will deliver for them. It is the predictable result of 45 years of Republican (and neoliberal Democratic) campaigning, starting with Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

The message to Democrats is clear: you must dump neoliberal economics (The Guardian)

However, in a provocative column, former Republican Mike Lofgren (who actually developed the concept of the “Deep State” before it was hijacked by the conspiratorial far-Right) argues that that we are trying to blame everyone except the people who actually voted for Donald Trump:

Even as the media intermittently deign to perceive that the GOP as an institution might be authoritarian, or that money might rig the system, or that billionaires just might not be our friends, there is one actor that is invariably held harmless...It is the American people, the fawned-over pet of every gassy idealist from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Thornton Wilder to the hack editorial writers of the present age. The “good sense of the people” is responsible for each bit of favorable fortune, and absolved of every disaster...

So-called progressives are especially prone to this delusion. They have built an entire edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of corporate or governmental control and repression, it is somehow unconnected with the moral character of the people the system administers. I remember reading several years ago the comments section of a left-of-center website in which one true believer proclaimed that “Trump supporters are socialists, but they just don’t know it yet.” So the raw material of socialism consists of people who think public libraries are the equivalent of Stalin’s gulags?

I recall an interview with George F. Will (a consummate hack if ever there was), wherein he was asked about the implications for democracy of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. "That wasn’t the American people," was Will’s pat and smug response. Well, then, George, who were they? New Guinea highlanders? Martians? They were Americans, all right, right down to their Camp Auschwitz T-shirts and their s**t on the floor of the Capitol building.

Sometime in the last 40 years...at least half the American people lost whatever shred of rationality they possessed...These people now think Joe Rogan or Alex Jones are philosophers on par with Henry David Thoreau or William James, except that they've never heard of the latter two. No one can say that Trump ran a stealth campaign. He clearly told the American people his agenda. Now imagine if any politician told the electorate the following:

⦁ I will lower your standard of living by putting steep tariffs on all the crap you buy at Walmart in order to eliminate taxes on my rich friends.

⦁ I will dump your health insurance, raise your insulin and other drug prices, and if you have a pre-existing medical condition, you can go ahead and die.

⦁ Forget about public health. I will put a brain-damaged lunatic in charge of vaccine policy, so that you will run a higher risk of dying in the next pandemic.

⦁ I will fill government departments with uneducated hacks so that it will be harder to forecast, prepare for and mitigate natural disasters. If you happen to live in an area that didn’t vote for me, I will withhold disaster relief from you.

⦁ If your kid has asthma, tough, because my rich donors will be able to pollute to their heart’s content. Do you remember reading about killer smogs in Pennsylvania steel towns and the Cuyahoga River catching fire? Get ready for more of that.

⦁ If you don’t like any of this agenda, don’t bother demonstrating, because I will use the military against you. And don’t expect habeas corpus when you’re thrown in prison, because I will invoke martial law. The courts won’t help you, because I stacked them with loyalists. And there won’t be a free press to report on it, because it will have been sued out of existence or taken over by my corporate friends.

Trump and his paladins made all of that abundantly clear, and tens of millions voted for it.

What, you say that a huge percentage were low-information voters who didn’t know what they were voting for? First, I rather doubt that they had no inkling, after eight interminable years, of what Trump’s program actually was. If, on the other hand, they really were ignorant of it, they are just as culpable, for they are lousy citizens without enough sense of civic responsibility to inform themselves.

Goodbye to all that — once again, and for the last time (Salon)

Finally, in her column Kyla Scanlon rounds up and takes a look at just about every reason for the election result out there. There were some interesting facts in her piece that I think deserve to be highlighted.

How Trump Won, What Happens Next, and How Disconnects Drove Democracy

In a blind survey, eighty percent of voters preferred Kamala Harris's policy platform compared to Donald Trump's, as long as they didn't know it was hers. This was the case even among Trump voters. That is, the voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris's policy prescriptions to Trump’s, but nonetheless voted for Trump. That makes it hard to argue that people voted against Harris because of any policy reasons.

This also squares with some other related facts. It appears a lot of people voted for Trump/Vance but for Democrats downballot, that is, they voted a “split ballot.” This was apparently quite common. Why people would prefer Trump but nonetheless vote for Democrats—who theoretically have opposing views on policy— for other offices is unclear.

People tended to vote for progressive policies in various referendums, despite Republicans being opposed to those polices. This includes things like minimum wages, abortion access, paid family leave, and so on. This indicates that there doesn't seem to be any inherent hostility among the general public to progressive policies themselves, including those championed by Democrats. This aligns with something I've seen my entire life—in survey after survey, slim to large majorities prefer progressive polices (better funding for schools, taxing the rich, universal health care, shrinking the military budget, etc.) to regressive ones promoted by Republicans when asked directly. Yet this does not translate to election wins for progressive politicians—in fact, precisely the opposite.

In surveys, people hate “Obamacare,” but support is much higher for the Affordable Care Act, despite these being the exact same thing: “Obamacare” is merely a pejorative nickname bestowed by Republicans on the legislation.

People who get their news mostly off of social media, podcasts and assorted online “influencers” (who tend to be more conservative-leaning) were more likely to vote for Trump over Harris. By contrast, people who still got their information from conventional and mainstream news outlets or the written word were more likely to vote for Democrats.

People whose view of economic conditions were accurate were more likely to vote for Harris and the Democrats. People whose information about the economy was distorted or false were more likely to vote for Trump and the Republicans. That is, Democratic voters were far better informed than Republican voters, the latter of whom held inaccurate or misleading views about economic and social reality (crime, etc.).

While the majority of people in surveys rate their own finances as good (~70 percent), they rate the economic state of the country as very bad. That’s a paradox. It’s also odd that people are supposedly unable to afford rent or food, yet consumer spending is unchanged, and has remained quite high. That is, all the economic metrics contradict what people say about the broader economy—or even about their own finances—in surveys. As Kevin Drum noted, all TV networks, especially FOX News, stopped talking about inflation the moment the election was over after mentioning it incessantly all year. In August, 3 in 5 people said the US was in a recession, even though it wasn’t.

In another survey (not mentioned by Scanlon), two-thirds of Americans expect tariffs to raise consumer prices, yet we’re constantly told that people voted for Donald Trump to lower inflation. In fact, Thanksgiving dinner is actually two percent cheaper this year than it was this at time last year (at least in Wisconsin).

This column from The Bulwark is mostly paywalled, but the free part does include some remarkable statistics about what the American people perceive to be reality. A survey from Yougov asked people what percentage of people fall into various catagories. The results were:

• Transgender: 21 percent

• Muslim: 27 percent

• Jewish: 30 percent

• Black: 41 percent

• Live in New York City: 30 percent

• Gay or lesbian: 30 percent

The actual numbers are:

• Transgender: 1 percent

• Muslim: 1 percent

• Jewish: 2 percent

• Black: 12 percent

• Live in New York City: 2 percent

• Gay or lesbian: 3 percent

Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias

All of these tend toward a conclusion that Scanlon doesn't make but I will: it's hard to see the election result as anything other than the result of mass brainwashing, mostly driven by FOX News, online news sources and social media. As cynical as that take is, it’s kind of hard to come to any other conclusion. “Vibes” are just a clever way to describe absolute hegemony over the narrative most Americans consume, which appears to be at variance with reality. We truly are living in Orwell’s world.