WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON HERE?
DID IT SUDDENLY GET DARK EARLIER AFTER THE ELECTION? WAS IT JUST EARTH REALIGNING ITS TILT TO THE SUN, OR THE U. S. POLITICAL TURN TO THE RIGHT? SOME EARLY NOTES ON DEALING WITH A NOVEMBER SURPRISE.
This newsletter has not a lot to add to the many and various published post-mortems on the Democratic Party, released while the body is still warm. An informal but powerful board of directors of the Party in late July chose not to renew the contract of their incumbent President effective January 20, 2025, after he experienced a nationally broadcast senior “moment” worthy of the Guinness Book of Records and immediately suffered a collapse in already dismal measures of support among American consumers. The board then replaced him without a shareholder vote with his hand-picked Vice President. But she was forced to compete for the top job against a notorious outside “takeover” artist, who had already taken over the Republican Party. This wealthy but shady businessman was a convicted con man who had succeeded eight years earlier, lost control, got back in the game despite new criminal charges for false claims of fraud, but nonetheless was bankrolled in his quest for the Presidency by the richest person in America. He had even faced down an attempted murder at one of his “road show” events to rally consumer support.
The task of the Vice President, Kamala Harris, was like that of a relief pitcher brought in from the bullpen in the late innings of the seventh and deciding game of the baseball World Series, with her team behind after the starting pitcher (showing his age) had faltered and frozen. Her surprisingly strong early pitching did pull her team together and quickly improved the betting odds that they could eke out a win after all against the takeover artist. She struck out her opponent, former President Donald Trump, the first time she faced off against him in the nationally televised game. In between innings, however, she didn’t care for talking to the media in the dugout, while her opponent was doing bits for any populist podcast or internet troll that would have him on (so to speak).
Her Party did pull off a well-produced, celebrity studded mid-August public Team Meeting that would serve as their main infomercial in the fight with Trump for consumer eyeballs and mindshare leading up to the November vote. But the glitzy Party performance came off many lower-income consumers as out of touch with their values and their problems. They saw a self-congratulatory Ode to the Joy of Woke that on election evening yielded to the cheerless gloom of an unanticipated wake. It was definitely not a more comforting Irish wake: Biden was not around at the finish. Endorsements of Harris by the hallowed celebrity trinity of Beyonce, Oprah and Taylor turned out to be no match for Trump’s heavy hitting lineup, which sounds like a baseball double-play combination: Hogan to Rogan to Musk. (Of note: two of Harris’s trio are billionaires, and the other is three-quarters of the way there, while Trump’s Musk could buy them all – so much for both Parties’ expressed focus on connecting with the lives and times of the middle class and the working class.)
In the unexpectedly early decision late on Election Night (before Pacific Standard Time chimed Midnight), the bell tolled for the Harris campaign when Fox News (possibly trying to make up with Trump for their 2020 call of Arizona for Biden) called Wisconsin to anoint the former President as once again President elect! By the end count a week later, it became clear Trump had won all seven of the “swing states”– a “November Surprise” to most everyone but Trump. Like Babe Ruth in the 1932 World Series “called his shot” to hit a home run in a tied game, Trump predicted shortly before the election that he would sweep all seven: one of the few statements on Truth Social that turned out to be true.
Trump indeed lied his way to victory right up to November 5: climate change is a hoax; he was robbed in the 2020 vote count; January 6 was a day of love; Southern border crossers are murderers, rapists, and lunatics sent there by their home governments; inflation under Biden is the worst in U.S. history; Harris is a low-IQ Marxist who just discovered she is Black and never worked at McDonalds; the Haitians shipped to Ohio are eating the local dogs and cats; the Democrats mandate that you will buy only electric cars; he is himself the “father” of IVF; and “massive fraud” was occurring in Pennsylvania voting (until it wasn’t, once that State was called for him).
But the Democrats in power also told some tall tales along the way: suggesting national “independence” from Covid had been achieved by midsummer 2021; assuring us (accompanied by the Federal Reserve) that rapidly rising inflation was merely “transitory;” describing the Southern border as secure and under control; reiterating that Biden is sharp as ever and in command of his mental faculties. Biden had long wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan in the worst way, and then did precisely that. His approval ratings never recovered.
Harris was quickly exposed to a classic trick question when asked if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden. Either a “no” or “yes” answer would prompt condemnation: that she was either loyal to a fault or showed faulty loyalty. In the end, her campaign was honorable but likely predestined to offer powerful evidence that Biden waited too long to accept his self-described role as a very significant but nonetheless one-term “transitional” President to a new generation of leadership – except that his successor would turn out to be not younger but older if he completes his term.
The Harris campaign slogan, “We’re Not Going Back,” made some tactical sense, but unfortunately also begged the question, “Where To, Then?” – which was never clearly answered. In the fog of mooted future policy, a harsher sense that we’re not going anywhere with her team emerged. There was too little time, through no fault of Harris, to effectively fill in the blanks in her policy statements. Any inference of standing for the status quo is particularly dangerous in a “change” election. This unforced error is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s self-referential “I’m With Her” 2016 bumper sticker, which at least should have been reversed to “She’s with Me.” Clinton had plenty of time to reboot, but she of course had to deal with the feckless Comey.
We should all pay better attention to America history now. Barely four years ago, our nation went to war with an “enemy from without” – Covid. It wounded over 120 million in the Homeland, and 1.2 million of them died: way worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11. We had war-gamed a pandemic but didn’t take the resulting playbook seriously. We resorted (perhaps with unintended excess) to mandated masks, as well as forced sheltering in place that felt to many adults like the dreaded school shooting drills, now a common childhood torture. Our former President suggested horse pills and bleach ingestion, to ill effect.
Somewhat left to our own devices, we used the technology of remote work to keep industry, commerce, and finance functional until we followed the emerging scientific knowledge, with shooting war level federal subsidies presided over by the Vice President). The “warp speed” effort developed a new biological weapon system to counteract the Covid enemy effectively, albeit gradually. Strong Covid “sleeper cells” still emerge seasonally and from state to state. Unfortunately, too many folks now look at our new national civilian defense bio-weaponry with suspicion and disdain, misled by the pseudo-science of opportunistic anti-science demagogues. As we approach the second Trump regime, however, we need to remember that the awful effects of the Covid War and related contemporary challenges are not unprecedented.
Inflation was rampant and most severe after World War I (up twenty-three percent 1919-20) and World War II (up 20 percent 1946-47). Anti-mask riots occurred in major cities during the 1918-120 Spanish flu outbreak. Book bans and suspicion of foreigners, immigrants, academics and other “enemies within” followed along, including the “Red Scare” of the 20s and the similar demagoguery of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon of the late 40s and early 50s. Wartime leaders like Churchill were turned out by angry and suspicious voters. President Wilson was replaced by a corrupt, womanizing cipher who promised that the nation would go back to “normalcy.” He died in office and was replaced by a Vice President who presided over the Roaring Twenties and the run-up to the market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression. President Truman survived to be reelected, but he had four years – not four short months – for Americans to get to know and understand him and his policies.
Here are some initial considerations for today’s wounded and grieving citizens, especially Democrats. Listen to your winners: they knew something important many of us missed. Get more state and local focused. Democrats have in place some very competent and innovative governors already from coast to coast and in between: pay them heed. Concentrate on legislatures, town councils, and school boards like the GOP did: they are key to “meeting voters where they live.” Recruit the leaders of the abortion access referenda that won in GOP states like Missouri and Montana to learn from their success and engage them in a broader social policy agenda locally and nationally.
Listen especially to Democratic winners in close House races who sensed their constituents’ feelings, desires and needs well in advance of election day. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/briefing/democrats-who-won.html. Listen to the women who won Senate races against solid GOP candidates, in several cases against the Trump tide in their states: Baldwin, Rosen and Slotkin were successful female winners who outperformed Harris.
Develop and fund a lawyers' Anti-Federalist Society (not a bad name, really, given working class and Gen Z antipathy or indifference to anything coming out of "Washington DC") to build a talent-rich counterweight to a manifestly partisan and corrupted federal judiciary, which will get worse under Trump and the new Senate’s rubber stamp approach to a swarm of nominees like Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida. Unite to fight for legislation to impose Supreme Court term limits. The idea polls well nationally. The majority ultra-conservative Justices will surely issue more awful decisions near term that will s cement their reputation for substituting political partisanship for traditional jurisprudential principles and respect for long-standing precedent. (Please keep the previous sentence to yourselves as Trump has suggested jailing critics of the Court.)
Don't write off Gen Z: they stand strongly with the Democratic agenda on combatting climate change and gun violence, because it’s right. The “future” is already proving that, and Gen Z owns the future, whether they like it or not (as Trump might say).
Encourage and celebrate employers that eliminate unnecessary requirements for a college degree to qualify for jobs with career building potential. Find ways to reduce the “mandated” administrative overhead expenses that drive up the already luxury-level costs of obtaining a college degree. Propose expanding and using the tax on the massive elite college hedge funds known as endowment that do not provide a dedicated annual level of debt -free support for tuition discounts for lower income students.
Focus also on supporting community colleges: that's where a lot of working-class young adults (and those who didn't get the highest weighted “AP” grades in high school because they had to work after class) earn at least some college credits. Help the states expand those vital local institutions to undercut the elite college oligopoly by allowing them to offer full four-year college degrees. Community colleges can operate with lower overhead and be much cheaper to run given the national surplus of PhDs, and the steady decline of tenured professorship hiring in traditional campuses. These local institutions have no need to fund huge sports and research complexes and staffs. Stand up this lower-cost runway to college bachelor degrees right alongside upskilling vocational associate degrees and allied apprenticeship programs. This intermixing of diverse career path learners should help blur some of the stark educational divide in the American populace today. Link both types of degree subsidies at the federal level to a voluntary national service program either in civilian or military roles.
Work with willing clergy and lay religious leaders to expose the hypocrisy of the White Christian Nationalist movement that brought so many basically decent people into its racist and anti-women voting orbit. And along the way learn and exhibit more understanding and support for religiously-minded people of all classes and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Willfully coming off as the anti-religion political party in America is political malpractice, and likely a misread of the data showing the fastest growing religious group is the non-affiliated. Those folks are often more suspicious of established institutions generally than disrespectful of personal spiritual connectedness and meaning.
Speaking of meaning, Democrats must find a more commonplace vocabulary to communicate their values, and who and what they care about. It’s a safe bet that their state and federal winners on November 5 did not speak in academic jargon. The didn’t use the six-syllable term “intersectionality” to identify any individual person’s or group’s problems in life. They didn’t ostentatiously self-correct their use of pronouns or “identity” categories, because they know even positive culture changes takes time and patience, and most usually precede rather than follow political change. Words matter, and a highly specialized “in-group” argot is kryptonite when it comes to winning politics.
Ditch any tendency to revert to cancel culture solutions and highly prescriptive speech codes as a first response to offensive language and expressive conduct. Both are blunt force weapons invented long ago by the other side. Call out the continuing right-wing tendency to resort to official censorship whenever their ideas are challenged with inconvenient truths. There is no shame in being an old-fashioned liberal these days.