Now that we've had a chance to catch our breath a little bit and get through the grieving process over last Tuesday's election, the inevitable recriminations have begun in earnest. Social media is awash with accusations against the Biden administration, the Kamala Harris campaign, the left, the right and everything in between. The Democrats are out of touch with Real America, they don't know how to talk to Latinos, men, young voters or anyone really except college-educated women. Was it an expression of deep desire for fascism, misogyny and racism or a simple admiration for the reality show ringmaster who tells them what they want to hear? I suspect we will spend many years dissecting what happened that put Donald Trump back in the White House this year.
There is no doubt a kernel of truth in much of what people are saying. Any losing team has to look at their game plan and question where they went wrong. This campaign was especially fraught with President Joe Biden belatedly realizing that he wasn't capable of campaigning, and the party taking the risk of running a woman and person of color against one of the most racist, misogynist demagogues ever to run on a major party ticket. It was never going to be easy. It's astonishing that we ever thought it would be. As Salon's Andrew O'Hehir observed, liberals will have to do some deep soul searching to determine what the party really is and how to adjust itself to what is clearly a new political landscape.
I think many of us just assumed that the nation would never elect Trump again because he had not only been repudiated once, he had subsequently attempted a coup, incited an insurrection and had been found guilty of fraud and defamation and is currently under criminal indictment at both the federal and state levels. He has already been convicted of 34 felonies. How could it even be possible that such a person would be returned to the White House?
The clues were there. The opinion polls had Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied for months with the margin of error showing that either side could have had a blowout. Joe Biden had been extremely unpopular for the past two years and the wrong track numbers are very high. People have lost faith in virtually all institutions, particularly the press, which they believe is corrupt. There has just been an overwhelming feeling of discontent and unhappiness in the cultural zeitgeist for the past four years. It's like a long post-COVID hangover.
People are angry about immigration even though most of them aren't affected by it at all. They are upset about culture war issues like diversity training and transgender kids even though they aren't personally affected by that either. But mostly they are distressed about the economy, specifically inflation. Everyone complains about higher grocery prices and restaurant tabs to the point where it's become a sort of national bonding exercise. If there's one thing everyone can agree on in this politically polarized country it's that prices are just too damn high.
All of this is in spite of the American economy being literally "the envy of the world" with a robust job market that hasn't been seen since the 1960s, roaring markets, high consumer spending on durable goods and travel and what would normally be considered a very reasonable inflation rate. But as the New York Times' Paul Krugman has discussed at length while most people feel they're doing ok they believe the rest of the country is in terrible shape. Nonetheless, most voters cite inflation as their most important concern. (Those numbers are highly driven by partisanship, so I think we can be sure they'll turn around pretty quickly once Trump is in office and Republicans attribute the already good economy to his magical genius.)
People have been very unhappy for the past four years in this country and I think inflation has simply become the symbol of that unhappiness. It represents that feeling of things being out of control, that nothing is working right anymore. It is a daily reminder of how things went bad in 2020 and never fully recovered. And, as it turns out, this is true all over the world.
There's been quite a bit of discussion over the past couple of days about the startling fact that the Democrats are just the latest in an unprecedented string of elections over the past few years in which the incumbent party has lost vote share and its leadership ousted. It is a global phenomenon.
Just to clarify: this isn’t just the first time since WW2 that all incumbent parties in developed countries lost vote share.
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 7, 2024
It’s the first time since this data was first recorded in 1905. Essentially the first time in the history of democracy (universal suffrage began in 1894). pic.twitter.com/04hdpN8aq0
As Derek Thompson in The Atlantic put it:
A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.
The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic...
Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.
Trump was one of the earliest casualties of this anti-incumbent movement. Unfortunately for us, we could not vanquish him sufficiently to prevent his return. The consequences of that are going to be particularly bad. The mainstream press managed to normalize him over the past four years, first by refusing to remind Americans how bad he was while he was in exile as he openly plotted his revenge and then by "sanewashing" his absurd lies and mental deterioration. As a result, Trump as a viable alternative made sense to a lot of people we didn't expect to vote for him. They thought by doing so that maybe we could just erase the last five years and pick up where we left off.
This election was an emotional tidal wave, one that's engulfed the whole world in the wake of the pandemic, the trauma of which we clearly have yet to fully process. We will eventually pull out of this. The problem is that when tidal waves recede they leave a tremendous amount of damage in their wake and I'm afraid it's going to be especially devastating in America.
