Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was “some strange historical fluke”. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. But aberrations tend not to happen twice, and last night puts the last nail in the coffin of that distorted interpretation. We were expecting a close race. It was a landslide.
And it’s time to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
6 November 2024 (Crete, Greece) – It is 10:30am where I am as I write this. The sun rose at 6:47am today and I had left my window blinds open. Blinding light. Silly of me. I really wanted to sleep in. But at about 7am my wife (who was up early watching U.S. election returns popped in, somber as hell, to say “You’ll never guess”. Eh. Her death mask was a dead give away. Time for a coffee and a think.
Last night in my last post before the results came out, looking “upstream”, and trying to divine the constellating depths of humankind, I wrote my feeling was people have really grown tired. I thought the tide that produced Brexit and brought The Orange Man to power in 2016 (and “Trump Britain” and “Trump Brasil” in due course) was receding. The election was an existential conflict, between sanity and delusion, service and opportunism, humanity and raging self-absorption.
But I couched those words by saying:
And in the end I also fear this. Considering that the U.S. population’s IQ and critical thinking have been a non-constant throughout the last 30(?) years, coupled with lack of knowledge, gross ignorance, information manipulation and outright dumbness are growing exponentially – the power of “surprise“ might just await us in the morning.
I should have also mentioned America’s systemic racism and misogyny – which will never change. This morning a friend texted me from the U.S. :
He was the worst President in history. And when he got voted out, he tried to stage a coup. Then he stole national secrets and sold the ones he didn’t store in the bathroom. He was convicted of fraud, found liable of sexual assault and convicted of 34 felonies. He is half a billion dollars in debt, owned by God only knows who, and the biggest national security risk the nation has ever had.
But at least he’s not a Black woman.
Oh, there is a lot to process, so many consequences for the U.S. that I cannot cover all I want to say in this post. I scanned some commentary. I read report a report this morning that certain states the Democrats once hoped to win now seem *many* election cycles away from Blue: Florida, Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas … etc., etc.
And polling (thank God) is done. A joke. And no, not just the Selzer Poll saying Harris was +3 in Iowa when it was really Trump +14. *Everyone* looks like an idiot. The irony? The results last night make Trump’s *lies* about the polls seem prescient rather than – again – *lies* is easy stuff. And he wins the popular vote, and the Senate.
Worse? Trump will claim the results last night were *proof* the 2020 election was rigged – and his fans will accept that. History will now need decades to extricate itself from a significant Trumpist strain of thinking that claims (preposterously) that the 2024 results proved “The Big Lie” true. Even after Trump is gone, “Trumpism” is now embedded in American politics, in American culture. It ain’t going away.
And however bad you thought a second Trump administration was going to be *before* – double that. He will not only *see* this as a mandate – and that was always going to happen with a win – but it will *actually have that appearance*, which will increase the size of his fold considerably. Trump has been vindicated.
Result? Folks who were planning to avoid a second Trump administration – seemingly normal folks – will now seek to join it.
Worse bottom line? There are no guardrails now. The American people have just told the two worst men in the United States – Trump and Musk – that the world is their oyster and they can do whatever they like. And because they are the worst of men, they will take that offer. And *then* some.
And the far, far bigger picture?
– The nation of Ukraine will cease to exist. A genocide there is now likely.
– NATO will cease to exist. He does not need to *withdraw* from NATO. Just neuter it.
– Almost all of the Gazans will be killed. Israel will annex Gaza and the West Bank *at a minimum* – but it may also seize some land in Lebanon and Syria through sheer military force. Because Israel *must protect itself*.
– There will be no war crime trials for Netanyahu or Putin, not now and not ever. But we all knew that no matter who won the election.
My Russian analyst friend (he is Russian but lives in Georgia) told me this morning that Putin’s plan to reconstitute the Soviet Union as a kleptocratic-oligarchic-autocratic hybrid will be back on track. American sanctions against Russia will dissolve. He also thinks chances of outright war in Georgia and Moldova have gone through the roof, and Russia will launch incursions into the Baltics juts to *test” Trump and the European Union.
Now, one of my really dark, dark, dark friends opined:
– A new Axis Of Evil is forming that Trump wants America to be part of. No one can stop that now. China, Egypt, Hungary, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia … so many. It is a congregation of autocracies that opposes the EU in all things.
– The number of nuclear powers will rise because Trump wants to give nukes to the Saudis, Emiratis, and Egyptians. The world will be far more dangerous.
– The U.S. government will be a kleptocracy of billionaires getting rich off the middle/working classes. No one’ll stop them.
– The Supreme Court will be ultra-conservative for decades—likely the rest of all our natural lives. Our civil rights and civil liberties will be winnowed down to nothing as the Court rather openly works on the project of making America a Christofascist theocratic state.
Me? Europe woke up to the possibility of being forced to allocate 20% of GDP to defense. Germany probably now wishes they had given Ukraine what they needed to handle it when they asked. With sanctions off Russia, the war machine that Russia will build with North Korea is no longer something Europe can handle.
I want to write more, I need to write more, but herein a few closing thoughts.
Many of us woke up scouring the news looking for clues as to what happened – grasping at data points, seeking to settle the pit in the stomach or to confirm our dread.
But it is important to face facts. Too many Americans refuse to do just that – which is a big part of what got them into this mess. And the facts are what they are. There is a sizable movement in this country that seeks to literally vote out democracy. This movement is fueled by a coordinated campaign on right-wing media. It exploits the frailties of American institutions. It weaponizes lies.
And it leverages its fractured technologies to turn the very notion of “the truth” into a partisan attack line. Too many of my American friends are clinging with ten fingernails to the idea that their institutions are robust enough to withstand fascism.
Nope. They are not. American institutions were far weaker than many observers had come to believe. Trump, much more experienced than he was at the outset of his first term in office and emboldened by a much more resounding victory, will test American democracy in a more serious way. Over the next four years, we will see a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.
And yet, it is time to admit that, in purely electoral terms, the argument that democracy is on the ballot simply does not work. The reason for that is not just that people care more about pocketbook issues like inflation or that incumbents have in general had a bad run of late. It’s that they don’t trust Democrats on the issue of democracy much more than they do Republicans. According to one exit poll in Pennsylvania, three out of four voters in the state believe that democracy in the United States is threatened; among those who do, it was Trump, not Harris, who had the edge.
This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade, a fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return anytime soon.
The extent to which most people now mistrust mainstream institutions is in many ways disproportionate. Despite Trump’s apocalyptic description of its current state, America remains one of the most affluent and successful societies in the history of humanity. And while ideological excesses have significantly weakened American institutions over the course of the last years, these institutions do remain capable of impressive work. Though maybe rarely.
And yet, we must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. As New York Times columnist Yascha Mounk noted this morning:
A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.
This was one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign. While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, she wedded herself to a slew of identitarian positions that happened to be deeply unpopular. Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions—or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a little pushback within her coalition.
People think Donald Trump is far outside the American cultural mainstream. Nope. But the problem is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider world of establishment institutions with which they are widely associated are also far outside the American cultural mainstream. Harris’ campaign had many opportunities to address that problem. She did not. She mistook “the winds of change” just as I did.
One analyst said this morning:
Harris could have asked her supporters not to self-segregate by race and gender the moment she became the official nominee. She could have defended a woman’s right to choose without condoning late-term abortions and stood up for the value of vaccines while acknowledging pandemic-era overreach by public health authorities. She could have chosen to make her case to the millions of swing voters who listen to the most popular podcast in the country. But she did not do any of that.
I don’t know whether Harris’ failure to mitigate Democrats’ glaring political weaknesses was due to fear and indecision or due to ideological conviction and a distorted perception of reality. But I do know that the price that she—and the rest of the world—is paying for that failure goes by the name of Donald J. Trump.
Trump has, since his entry into politics, been the spearhead of a populist international. And so his ability to come back from the political dead, likely reconquering the White House even after his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election had seemingly rendered him radioactive, should serve as a loud warning to moderate forces in other parts of the world.
Because what last night’s election proved was that while each populist incarnates some of the particular qualities of their specific national context, it should by now be amply evident that every country is vulnerable to this form of political appeal. Many of the same trends are well underway in those countries as well. And sooner or later, voters who deeply distrust their own institutions are likely to vote for an anti-establishment bullfighter of their own.
But as I have said time and time again, we have forgotten our history – assuming anybody actually reads anymore. The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward moral progress and justice. Freedom, democracy, liberalism are mere blips on the screen of humanity. Autocracy, totalitarianism and dictatorships have long ruled the roost.
So it is not hard to see that the world has come to a critical juncture, a point of possibly catastrophic collapse. Multiple simultaneous crises – many of epic proportions – raise doubts that liberal democracies can govern their way through them. In fact, it is vanishingly rare to hear anyone say otherwise.
More to come.