Shaken and Stirred
A year-end grab-bag of thoughts on where we are and where we could be going
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been struggling a bit since the election. Not emotionally, but intellectually. My previous post, about how my understanding of American conservatism got scrambled by teaching a course on it, is one expression of this struggle. But of course the big thing that’s provoked that and other forms confusion was Donald Trump winning a second term as president.
I expected him to win for most of the previous year, mostly because I was convinced Biden was a very weak candidate for re-election. Once Biden got swapped out for Kamala Harris, my hopes for a Democratic win surged. But that proved illusory. Trump won after all, fulfilling my longstanding expectations. Yet outside of a scenario in which Biden stayed in the race after his abysmal debate performance at the end of June, I didn’t expect Trump to win the popular vote and come close to winning an outright majority. Yet he accomplished both of those things.
I’ve spent the past nine years writing about Trump and the rise of right-populism in the U.S. and around the world. At first, I didn’t believe a man like Trump could win. (I notoriously titled a column in September 2016, “Donald Trump Is Poised to Lose in the Biggest Landslide in Modern American History.”) Then, like many liberals, I convinced myself his absurdly narrow victory (winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million) was a fluke. The GOP, I believed, was extremely unlikely to dump Trump and revert to the ideological configuration of 2012, let alone 2004 or 1984. But the electorate as a whole rejected him, and seeing him in power, the voters wanted him gone.
In that respect, the outcome of the 2020 election confirmed my hunch. But nagging worries remained. Like the fact that Trump, despite losing, won eleven million more votes than he had four years earlier. How could it be that eleven million people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 were converted to support him in 2020 by observing him up close all that time? And what to make of the fact that Biden’s seven-million-vote popular-vote margin masked the reality that Trump came about 43,000 votes in a handful of states from winning the Electoral College again?
Those observations nagged at me over the intervening four years, as polls showed Republican voters sticking to Trump, and federal and state prosecutors came after him, and as other polls showed Hispanic and black voters showing increasing support for him, and as Biden’s approval sank and kept slowly falling, with signs of his debility showing up more glaringly as we approached 2024.
Through it all, I told myself Trump could win again. But I assumed such a victory would again be a fluke, which would end up serving as an indictment of our 18th-century electoral system. Though that’s not what happened. Trump just won. Every swing state. By comfortable enough margins that we knew the outcome before morning on the day after Election Day. By more electoral votes than he had in 2016, and by roughly 14.3 million more total votes than he won back then—before two impeachments, before January 6, before multiple felony indictments, before felony convictions had been handed down by a jury. The American electorate looked out him and Kamala Harris and said we’d prefer this guy more than a normie Democrat.
That has left me shaken—and convinced that I need to adjust some of my assumptions. Like my lingering hope that Trump and what he represents politically would be a passing phase followed by something more decent and less hateful, more thoughtful and less demagogic. This time it feels different to me. It feels like something has been consummated. We’ve lived through a historically rare side-by-side comparison of MAGA and Classic Democrat, and the voters made a choice to re-embrace the former and dump the latter.
What does that mean—for the American present and future, and for the world’s present and future? Those are the questions I’ve been focused on since I launched this Substack 2-1/2 years ago, and they are what I’ll be continuing to write about going forward, now with the benefit of the truckload of additional information provided by the outcome of the 2024 election. What follows in this post are a handful of tentative observations I will develop further over the coming weeks, months, and years.
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