How Not to Think About Elections

A Plea for Holism

Every election cycle there is a desire to boil the whole thing down to one or maybe two factors. “The Economy.” “The War.” “Woke.” and so on and so forth. “This election was a referendum on X” is a clichéd formulation you hear everywhere. This is because election coverage is driven by two forces with an interest in oversimplification. The first is the media, who want a snappy and concise framing to repeat over and over. And the second are political professionals of various types, who are usually working for specific factions or have their own ideological agendas. They naturally want to associate their faction with the winning reason or disassociate it from the losing one. The latter is aided by the widespread belief that rigorous analysis comes from plucking out the correct cause from underlying reality, which is the unfortunate byproduct of the domination of positivist social science in American intellectual discourse.

It seems that every few years we get a new “metric.” Right now, there is a big discussion of “overperformance” and “underperformance.” Progressive candidates apparently “underperformed” where a “generic moderate” would have done better. The argument used to be that left-leaning candidates and their positions dragged down the ticket and led to disastrous losses. Now the argument is that left candidates are not winning imaginary elections. Because that’s what these essentially are. You cannot simply abstract from a concrete election in a concrete time and place and generate a hypothetical candidate. You have to take into account locality, the opposing candidate, the events of the campaign, the media environment, etc. You know, what actually happened and what it all means. The preposterous case is now being made that, were it not for progressives, the Democratic blowout would’ve been much bigger.

This is getting insane. Let’s try to put this back into the language of common sense. The Democrats just won the biggest midterm victory in over 50 years. One could argue that is the first decisive result in American politics for over a decade. And they did this with candidates on the ticket that openly declared themselves to be socialists. With some of the biggest national figures being not only socialists but Muslim socialists! Now, apparently that wasn’t an insuperable obstacle. But instead they are being cast in the role of spoilers again, even when they didn’t actually spoil anything. Did they help? Again, this is hard to determine in the abstract. But I will point out that the Berniecrat, DSA wing has always pushed an economy-first message. And not just that, but a class conflict message, which in America, we call “populism,” because, of course, we don’t believe in class. It is also a fair point, though, that the contemporary left can’t take full credit for this: Democrats have long had a populist tradition, but what they can say is that they’ve been some of the loudest voices pushing for a return to New Deal orthodoxy in the face of all sorts of neoliberal heresies. They can also say, “We’re apparently not electoral cancer, as you’ve said we are, so how about we now argue about things on their merits. For one thing, clearly a little bit of class war can’t hurt.”

Now, I want to turn to some of the narratives of the election that are forming. Or maybe more accurately, how such narratives are formed. Let’s look first at “The War.” The story that the war was the decisive turning point in the fate of the administration has a satisfying ring to it and serves various interests. First, the America First wing of the Republican Party can say, “See, foreign wars, blah blah.” This is the argument that Vance is trotting out as he prepares his bid for leadership of the GOP. “It was a viable project if not for this.” But you also have the data-boy faction of the Democratic intelligentsia pointing to it as a key, but baffling thing. In a recent interview with Eric Levitz in Vox, data macher David Shor expresses stupefaction at Trump’s choices:

So, I think Republicans were on the cusp of securing a level of power in American politics that no party had experienced in decades. But Trump spent down that power to accomplish his goals. I definitely didn’t see that coming.

As for this election, I did not predict that Trump would start a super unpopular war while also doing massive tariffs and making a bunch of other domestic political miscalculations.

First of all, not even the data fully supports this account—Trump was on a downswing from day one—but I’m gonna leave that to other number crunchers.

I’m sorry, what? Didn’t you see that a politician would attempt to spend their political capital to accomplish what they stated in their campaign? Again, if the viability of the project depended on it not being carried out, how viable was the project? Was the political dominance ever really so secure? “As long as they did nothing they said they’d do, they’d be fine.” Tariffs are a gimme; he’s always endorsed them unambiguously. Now, the war is a bit tricky, but it wasn’t impossible to foresee. I identified a war in November 2024 with Iran as a distinct possibility, as did other commentators. After the failure of the domestic agenda and the apparent success of Venezuela, it became a lot more likely: “The real risk is that if this seems to buoy the Trump administration and the Republicans politically and solve rather than deepen their factional disputes, then we can imagine more bellicose gambles of this kind. Despite Trump’s long-vaunted shyness about protracted conflicts, his hubris might get the better of him—and us.” Matt Yglesias, too, finds Trump “enigmatic,” when we’ve all observed this man closely for a decade. The problem is that their model of political rationality is wrong.

If you took a more holistic account of Trump and his coalition, the risk of war always appeared pretty high. First of all, very powerful parts of that coalition and his allies abroad always wanted one. Others didn’t, but the prospect of a quick and easy victory offered a way to square the circle. Then there was Trump’s character: vain, reckless, obsessed with displays of strength, and easily convinced that he could pull off what other presidents couldn’t because he was “smart.” Then there were the frustrations of governing at home: He couldn’t simply order the economy to obey him, but he could order an attack. After the victory in Venezuela, another foreign adventure became an obvious temptation. I used the history of fascism to put these things together; it drew my attention to the noxious cocktail of nationalism, personal ambition, fragmented power structures, and aggression, but you didn’t need to lean on that history in particular, although it helped a lot. What you did need, however, was some kind of theory that tried to approach these things as an interacting whole and find its internal tendencies and contradictions—that is to say, finding its internal logic, not imposing a logic from without.

My point is not to talk myself up; it’s to recommend a form of political judgment that’s more qualitative and more holistic. History, as such, trains us to look at complex totalities that include character, institutions, interests, and events. You know: an individual and their context. That might sound like a tall order in the midst of unfolding events, but it’s actually closer to the way we normally judge situations and people. But we allow this form of judgment to atrophy when we substitute these abstract models of rationality to dominate our understanding of politics.

Even a narrative with a lot of evidence is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. We know “The Economy” and “Affordability” are big parts of this election. Polls tell us so. Our friends and neighbors tell us so. But what does that really mean? As Matthew C. Klein points out in a recent Substack, several conventional indicators paint a fairly benign picture: unemployment is low, real consumption is strong, and household finances look reasonably healthy in the aggregate. On paper, we’re not in the Depression or the stagflation of the 1970s. The scale of the political repudiation therefore needs more explanation than simply pointing to “The Economy.” When people say “the economy,” they don’t necessarily mean the same thing as when economists think about it. Clearly, voters’ economic dissatisfaction is itself something we have to understand, not an explanation that does all the work for us. I don’t fully understand it yet, but allow me to offer a provisional explanation.

What we need to understand is that this election truly represents the failure of Trumpism and its repudiation by the electorate. “But John, that sounds even more abstract than what you are denouncing!” At first, but once you go through every concrete determination, all the particulars—its economic program, its foreign policy, its immigration policy—you can see it clearly. Voters registered dissatisfaction with all of the above. These were the substance of the promised national renewal: We were supposed to become richer, stronger, safer, more sovereign, etc., etc. etc. What did we get? Bupkis. A whole lot of nothing and really less than nothing. There’s an idea in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks that he calls “the wave of materialism,” which he relates to a broader “crisis of authority,” where people stop believing in the political ideologies they once did. This promised national renewal failed to bind people into a greater whole, to give any sacrifices a shared purpose. That offers one way to understand why people might get especially tetchy about their finances: “What did I get out of this?” “What was it all worth?” It didn’t solve any of the problems. Then “The Economy” becomes more “salient,” as the data boys like to say, because people no longer believe the whole thing is going anywhere.

The political stakes of getting this analysis right are high. We need to take this opportunity to drive a stake through the undead heart of the Trumpist project, to insist repeatedly on its utter and total failure, and not allow the Republicans to regroup and put it back together piecemeal. The electorate has delivered its verdict. And it’s one that strongly suggests a deep rejection of a whole government, not just irritation with this or that part of it. Now, it’s time to ratify their sentiments and give them shape through decisive leadership. Explain over and over what failed, why it failed, and what we will build in its place.