In The Zeitgeist

It’s been two weeks since the election, and we now wait with dread for the MAGA regime to take over and reformat, or at least attempt to reformat, American society. I’ve already written one post – I called it an election post-mortem, but it was really more of a reaction to the gut punch, immediate thoughts post. Like many of us, I’ve been consuming tons of post-election content as we all process this historic event. Here are some deeper thoughts, bringing in a little social theory.

Now that the votes are mostly counted, it is plain that Trump will beat his 2020 popular vote, by 3 or 4%. Harris will fall far short of Biden’s 2020 vote, which is the essential story of her loss. It’s a shame, given that she will likely have the third highest total of votes in Presidential election history, after only Biden in 2020 and her opponent in this election. As I put it earlier, she wasn’t unpopular – she just wasn’t quite popular enough, for a post-2020 candidate.

Assuming that there was no fraud (let’s not go down that conspiracy hole), the problem for Harris was clearly turnout, which then intersected with the brutal equation of the swing states and the electoral college. Where did those millions of Biden 2020 votes go, that might have tipped the balance?

One answer I’m reading goes back to that famous quote from 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid.” The narrative goes something like this: neoliberalism and globalization have hollowed out the middle class, and those corporate Democrats just don’t offer any solutions, instead pushing a bunch of woke nonsense.

This narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson explaining it. She states that Biden was actually stepping away from neoliberalism, and that Trump will take us back. The economy was working more in favor for the working class under Biden than it has in 40 years. Under Trump, it’s back to the old ways. The rich will keep getting richer and working class Americans will get the shaft.

Harris, in her bid to be elected, offered economic policies, with specifics, clearly addressed at helping working people – she calls them the middle class. Some examples, listed on her campaign web site, are a $6,000 Child Tax Credit, and up to $25,000 assistance for down payments for first-time home buyers.

On top of that, Democracts, including Harris, ran decidedly un-woke campaigns this cycle. I’ll let Jon Stewart take it away.

The fact is, President Biden handled the economy well, considering that his administration started in the midst of a global pandemic. As this MSNBC article puts it:

In what will be a generous gift to his successor, President Joe Biden beat inflation, brought down gas prices, created millions of jobs, spurred strong growth, boosted retirement savings and revived American manufacturing — just in time for Donald Trump to take credit for all of it.

But MAGA partisans on social media and the pundits in Jon Stewart’s video alike are echoing this “Democrats are too woke and are ignoring real-world problems” idea. Why are they falling for it? The answer in one word could be: misinformation. As the MSNBC article puts it: “Democrats need to realize that they have less a policy problem than a propaganda problem” – in other words, their messaging just doesn’t resonate.

Democrats have earnestly tried to steer away from identity politics and focus on the material needs of voters, but unfortunately for them, MAGA Republicans have been able to make the “too woke” label stick. As this excellent substack essay points out, Trump is the one who ran on identity politics, and for him it worked. His promise to his base is a future that is white and Christian, just like in the good old days. Nothing could be more identitarian.

Let’s face it, the partisan conflict was always about the right-wing backlash to the emancipation of women and minorities, and to the rise of multiculturalism, that came in the wake of the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s. As another substacker starkly puts it, this race was about race. Whites will lose their majority status in the United States in the next couple of decades, and for many millions of them, that is too much to take. Hence their slogan, “take America back,” which they will now proceed to do, with a vengeance.

But then why did Trump gain support compared to 2020 from almost every demographic group, including non-whites? Even including undocumented immigrants, who presumably know he wants to have them deported. Could it be that misinformation thing – all that money poured into ads to undermine the Harris campaign’s messaging and the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, with the help of Trump’s billionaire mascot (or is it co-President?), who owns one of the Internet’s largest social media platforms? But then what about all the money poured into the Harris campaign – she both outraised and outspent her opponent – was it not applied effectively?

Was it just a case of tactical errors in the info wars? I’ve argued on this blog before that in this partisan age, when most voters know where their loyalty lies, political messaging is largely about rallying the troops, so to speak. The specifics don’t much matter. Except they might, when it comes to those crucial swing voters, who are the ones who actually decided the last three elections. Trump’s crude identity attacks and simplistic points (he literally just called Biden and Harris “the worst” and “failures” and left it at that) might amount to a blunter but better instrument of information delivery. People have thick heads, after all.

Let’s allow, however, that average folks, while maybe not intellectual giants, are not complete morons, and understand what their interests are. As this election post-mortem article puts it, “politics are material and people actually do know their conditions.” Yes, the Biden-Harris administration made great strides in improving the U.S. economy. By the standards that are conventionally used to measure the economy – inflation rate, employment rate, economic growth – we’re on the right path.

But people are still feeling the pain of high prices. It was the rate of price increase that was tamed, not prices themselves, which are still higher than four years ago. And young people – the demographic whose loss may well have been the hardest for the supposedly Gen Z-appealing Harris – face a future where jobs do not pay enough to achieve major life milestones such as buying a home or raising a family. In the face of this hard reality, rosy economic statistics are not much of a palliative.

That last article from The Guardian makes another point, one I have not seen anywhere else, but it rings true to me:

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.

Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.

It’s like the American people got a taste of life in a Scandinavian-type socialist society, then had the rug pulled out from under them, and for that they punished the incumbent. We almost got there, people! We were on our way to fully automated luxury communism! But then Biden did the bidding of his corporate masters, and back to normal it was. Only someone forgot to tell him that for most Americans, “normal” sucks.

For most Americans, normal sucks so bad that they were willing to vote in, or allow to be voted in, a convicted felon and known degenerate who is probably also a national security threat. Like some kind of Hail Mary play to shake things up and maybe, somehow, end up better off on the other side.

The Guardian article has an even more depressing take:

Perhaps most emblematic of this is at the heart of Trump’s campaign: his embrace of extremely online tech billionaires, crypto currency and online influencers. If the archetype of Trump’s win in 2016 was the left-behind post-industrial Rust belt manufacturing worker – or, perhaps more accurately, the car dealership or McDonald’s franchise owner in a left-behind post-industrial Rust belt town – this year it is the crypto scammer, the dropshipper, the app-based day trader, the online engagement farmer.

That embrace was Trump’s message, and at the core of his gains, especially with young men. Without civil society and without strong unions, people believe the only path to success is getting one over on someone else. And who is better at that than Trump?

While the core of the resurgent-left generation of Sanders was downwardly mobile college-educated professionals, selling their labor for wages without the prospect of buying a house or retiring on a pension, the second wave of newly aging-in Trump voters entered adulthood without even those prospects, hoping only to grind out a living through scams. But this is fundamentally an anti-social and anti-humanist mode of economic activity that contributes nothing to society and offers nothing but alienation to its victims. The result is people willing to vote for someone they know will cause immense harm to others, hoping it will help them personally.

In other words, America has thrown up its collective hands and declared, “fuck it, let’s all be criminal degenerates now.” If a toxic mashup of white supremacy and billionaire kleptocracy is the best we can get, then let’s tap into our inner Joker, embrace the breakdown of society, and get on with the Purge.

That’s a dark view of the American electorate, and the sense that it might be true contributes to the dread that Harris voters like me feel. It’s the real kick in the face to the almost 50% of voters – almost! – who rejected Trump. We thought our society could be both civil and multicultural. But enough other Americans decided, I guess, that those two ideas are incompatible.

I will now turn to generations and turnings theory. I note that the brief experience of the Covid welfare state came about because of an emergency. In the Crisis Era or Fourth Turning, the perception of emergency creates urgency and acceptance of the need for drastic measures, shifting power from the market to the state. This reshapes society, and lays the foundation for a new understanding of civic community.

If the public indeed got a taste of that during Covid and liked it, that just shows how receptive the living generations are to radical change, as well as to authoritative leadership taking control. It could simply be that Republicans prevailed in the election because they are promising both of these things – radical change and authoritative leadership.

The Democrats offered sensible policies that have a track record of actually working – but to a majority of voters, that wasn’t satisfactory. They wanted sweeping reform of the system. I’ll let Jon Stewart make the point for me again. He might be the commentator out there who gets it the most.

If our government is indeed, as Stewart puts it, “an overly regulated system that is no longer responsive or delivering for the needs of the people,” then no wonder the party that shows that it is willing to break the rules is the one that got the most votes. The MAGA Republicans are more attuned to the social mood, and more aligned to where we are in the generational cycle – whether by craft or by instinct, who knows.

This is also connected to how the non-college educated working class has been migrating to the Republican party, in what has been called America’s 7th party system. A political party realignment pretty much always happens in a Fourth Turning. In the last cycle, it was the rise of the New Deal coalition, which gave the U.S. its modern social welfare state, such as it is.

The new MAGA coalition, if that’s what is forming, wants to dismantle the New Deal and make the Reagan revolution – that is, neoliberalism – a permanent fixture of American life. They want to add a heavy dose of social conservatism, rolling back civil rights that have been hard-won over this generational cycle. And also tariffs, Trump’s way of giving the middle finger to globalization.

None of this will close the wealth gap between the working class and the wealthy elites. So why is the working class supporting it? It’s hard not to conclude that lower educated, less informed voters are simply more susceptible to the rightwing’s superior media ecosystem. Or just go ahead and call it idiocracy.

It remains to be seen if MAGA will fully consolidate their power. Their victory is no mandate; the margins are too thin, and there was support for progressive causes despite Trump winning the popular vote. But unlike in 2017, Republicans in 2025 will control all three branches of the United States government. There might not be any “guardrails” or “checks and balances” to contain the MAGA policy agenda. The Constitution is about to get a major stress test (save us, John Thune!) which it might not survive in its current form.

In 2016, Trump’s election galvanized the Democratic opposition, which launched a “resistance” movement, so that partisan conflict was always in the background during Trump’s first administration. Today, the mood among Democratic partisans is one of retreat to nurse their wounds. We’re all over on Bluesky, sharing tips on how to manage life under tyranny. I don’t see much coming from the Democratic party’s leadership, if they even have any at this point. Is it possible they will cave, and give the Heritage Foundation the bloodless revolution it wants?

I suspect not, given how radical the MAGA agenda is. MAGA’s definition of the emergencies which require an empowered state (immigrants! gays! reproductive rights!) mean they are prescribing fixes that will not be popular, including mass deportations, and – potentially – banning abortion and gay marriage nationwide. It’s hard to imagine this will all proceed without friction.

Could we have avoided all of this if only Biden had kept the Covid welfare state going, as the Guardian article suggests? He could have pushed the idea of an ongoing pandemic emergency and used it to instigate more radical change, and taken us to a better resolution of the Crisis. Instead, we’re going to create our own emergency here.

There’s no way to know what could have happened, so it’s beside the point. We missed our chance. The future ahead can’t be known either; we see through a glass darkly. All we can be sure of is that somewhere in that undiscovered country lies the climax phase of this Crisis Era. God help us to get through it.

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This is possibly the longest post I have ever written on this blog. I keep going back to it and rewriting it. It’s been a lot to process these past weeks. Thanks for bearing with me, dear reader, in these trying times.