It Was A Bad Election Cycle— The Dems Will Come Back, Although I Wish I Could Write They'll Improve

"Into The Abyss" by Nancy Ohanian

Yes, most American voters— albeit perhaps not most Americans— since only about 60% of those eligible even voted— preferred Trump. Too late to do anything about it now and it’s counter-productive to spend too much of your psychic energy hating them, let alone expressing anger towards them. But I’m seeing a lot of that. We need to be looking forward towards 2026 and 2028 now.

Yesterday, Morris Pearl, founder and co-chair of Patriotic Millionaires, wrote that “A self-avowed authoritarian successfully wielded the economic frustrations of millions to win the most consequential election of our nation’s history. The Democratic establishment has only itself to blame. Voters demanded a fundamental overhaul of a rigged economic system. When neo-liberal Democrats dithered, Donald Trump offered to clear the board, and voters chose the dark unknown rather than the status quo. The only question remaining is, why are Democrats surprised? This is the entirely predictable result of a multi-decade strategy to appease the rich that met no serious resistance. This round went to the oligarchs.”

Arash Azizi is an historian and author who, yesterday, urged his Atlantic readers to not give up on America, “a big beautiful land of contradictions.” He noted that on Wednesday a lot of Americans “may have felt inclined to resent their neighbors. How could more than 70 million of them vote for a convicted felon who had hobnobbed with a fascist, showed little respect for the country’s institutions or alliances, and couldn’t even promise not to rule as a dictator? Some foreign observers on social media seemed to react similarly, seeing in Trump the worst traits of American caricatures: egomania, narcissism, chauvinism, carelessness. But these prejudices were unfair on November 4, and they are still unfair on November 8. Yes, Trump is a true native son of this country, and some of its worst tendencies have allowed him to flourish. And yes, those who care about the future of the United States have every right to be worried about the trends he has unleashed or exploited— authoritarianism, misogyny, conspiracism.”

As an Iranian Canadian socialist who moved here from Europe in 2017, I hear my share of anti-American chatter from left-leaning Middle Easterners, Canadians, and Europeans. Many seize on simple stories about America as a land of hyper-capitalism, violence, racism, and imperialism— and such stories are not in short supply. The United States remains the world’s only developed country not to have public health care. It is by far the world’s biggest military power. And expressions of racial animus can be loud, deadly, and persistent.

But to reduce America to these clichés is to miss much that is extraordinary. This same country of megalomaniac capitalism is home to public libraries and research universities that are the envy of many European social democracies— institutions tended by millions of Americans deeply committed to their survival. Those who imagine America as a country of racists perhaps haven’t actually visited its small towns, where mosques, Hindu temples, and gurdwaras prosper next to churches and synagogues. In this supposedly immigrant-hating country, Trump banned entry to the residents of seven Muslim countries in 2017— only for thousands of Americans to show up at airports in protest. Thousands more Americans staff immigrant-rights groups. For a narcissistic country, the United States has a lot of excellent public museums that acknowledge historical injustice and encourage self-reflection.

This country got its start as a naively daring social experiment already riven with contradictions. A group of European slave owners on ethnically cleansed land pledged to establish a nation whose self-evident truth was the equality of all. And yet, what they founded was a breathtakingly dynamic republic whose tree of creativity has never ceased leafing. The hopes vested in the United States have been sometimes vindicated, sometimes dashed. Chattel slavery endured here long after it was eradicated in Britain. But in 1860, Americans did elect a president who brought about its abolition at the end of a bloody civil war. The postwar promise of Reconstruction gave way to Dixiecrat rule and Jim Crow, but the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s was to become the most inspiring example of civil disobedience of its era, encapsulated in the call of Martin Luther King Jr. for the United States to “live up to the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

…The essence of America has always been the battle over its essence. No one election has ever determined its complete or permanent nature, and that is as true now as it was in 1860 and 1876. If today’s America is the America of Donald Trump, it is also the America of those who would stand up to him.

Don’t give up on this beautiful country. Its best traditions are now in danger, and no special genius of constitutional design will automatically keep them intact. In the hands of a president who may wish to model himself on Vladimir Putin, democratic institutions will be tested like never before. Americans will have to fight to safeguard them at every level of government. Daunting as this task may be, I have faith that Americans will rise to it. Trump may be the Founders’ nightmare, but their dreams can still outlive him.

On Thursday, Josh Barro let loose: Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose. He wasn’t surprised by the “bad decision, one that will expose our country to unreasonable risks in areas from foreign policy to public health. Fiscal policy will get worse— budget deficits will become even larger, keeping interest rates high, and programs that provide health care to the poor and elderly are likely to be trimmed back to finance tax cuts for rich people. Abortion rights are likely to be further restricted, with a hostile administration using the powers of the FDA and the DOJ to make abortion harder to provide. And we’ll have another four years under Trump’s exhausting, mercurial and divisive leadership, making our politics nastier and stupider.” But he blamed it on Democrats, not MAGA voters.

A conservative Democrat who will probably be a Republican in a few years, he could have as easily been talking about L.A. but he wrote that in NYC, where he lives, “we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services… Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated… And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population— we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy…. [M]eanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less ‘inclusive’ places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life.”

He wrote that “unfortunately [he’s] a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why ‘can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?’ would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post-George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat.”