Reading, Watching 11.10.24
The Blame Game
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There will be many postmortems about this election — and many of them will come in before there is a clear picture of the electorate _ if we ever really do. We are going to hear ad nauseam about who is responsible: Latino voters, the multiracial working class, the education gap, wokeness, the democratic elites, the left, angry young men, white women, etc., etc. etc. It will be tempting to substitute analysis with Menckenesque gestures of dismissal about the booboisie, something I’m certainly not above. People will want to resolve all the apparent paradoxes and ironies with the simplest possible takes. Developing new theories about the country is important and interesting, but I have a few words of caution before people settle in on their favorite take. First, the country is always changing. Society is undergoing shifts. The electorate is moving. People change their minds. And present trends aren’t destined to continue. A big mistake Democratic strategists make in my opinion is to reify the electorate: to say this or that fixed category will do this or that all the time. Well, apparently not! Another thing to think about is which factors are purely contingent and which are structural, was there a failure of tactics or strategy: could some particular mistakes have been avoided or was the entire worldview of the liberals the problem? Considering the shift rightward everywhere it will be tempting to go for the latter. Although it’s my preference to understand things as being parts of a dramatic narrative, it’s also possible to overreact. Maybe Biden could’ve dropped out earlier. But here’s where the contingent and the structural start to interact in interesting ways: why were the Democrats as an institution so slow to affect that change? Why were the Republicans able to take big risks and field a more dynamic candidate?
One last thought about this using my favorite little fact about this election so far. Trump won votes from two diametrically opposing constituencies: Arab-Americans who were upset about the war in Gaza and Lebanon and right-leaning Jews who are hyper-Zionist and angry about what they perceive as the toleration of antisemitism by Biden-Harris. Trump has also been pretty tolerant of antisemitism—although perhaps less so of anti-Zionism—among his surrogates and supporters, so what gives? Again, there are a few ways to understand this. The first is, “Well, they are just stupid.” Again, tempting, but itself not intellectually adventurous. One thing to keep in mind is that these are both protest votes. Trump has always represented an anti-systemic alternative, an emotional attack on business as usual. He’s the ultimate protest vote. Also, these are always communities that have “conservative values:” tightly-knit communal and family bonds, roots that go back to the old county, they are integrated into America but also do their own thing. They are like little nations with their own nationalisms. Trump’s racism and xenophobia can be read as the frank acceptance of ethnic particularism—like a big Tammany ward heeler counting off the Jews, the Italians, the Irish—something that appears more realistic and more like the way these groups think and speak. It’s kind of a transnationalism. “But these are totally opposed ethnic particularisms, this is crazy!” Well, it’s not coherent on the level of logic perhaps, but it has coherence on the level of images, feelings, and emotions, which are always more decisive.