The 2016 election has been the rocket fuel propelling not just Trumpism but also the reaction to the President Spray Tan’s faux populism. If not for it, this blog wouldn’t exist.
As a nod to my grandfather, who worked at elections for decades, I was a poll officer on the fateful day and was at the precinct from 5:00am until after 10:00pm. I walked home having heard no results because use of cellphones was verboten to all but the precinct chief. Nonetheless, I sensed that it was not going well. Older hands among the poll officers reliably predicted when waves of voters would descend upon us and were surprised when an anticipated late-in-the-day surge didn’t materialize.
Experience as a voter also hinted that something was not copacetic. For The Better Half and me, election day is ritual. We drag ourselves to the polls before 6:00am to be among the first to vote. Sporting “I voted” stickers, we then have breakfast at our favorite diner. In 2008, our custom was partly thwarted; we arrived early but the queue already stretched beyond the middle school’s grounds and wound around the end of the block. Voting took longer, but the election’s historical gravity made the wait enjoyable. We even remembered to give one another a “terrorist fist jab” à la the famous New Yorker cover as we exited the polling site and made for the restaurant.
The crowd milling outside when the polls opened in 2016 was substantial but far short of 2008’s throng. Though anecdotal and impressionistic, this perhaps signaled a deficit in enthusiasm. In our left-leaning neighborhood, this didn’t bode well for the Clinton campaign. Ms. Clinton prevailed in Virginia but fell short of the expected margin. My niggling concerns became tangible when, once home, I found The Mistress of the House already trying to keep despondency at bay.
The shock, horror, and disbelief among Democrats have been well chronicled. A mass embarkation for the seven stages of grief began. Acceptance was elusive. The Orange Interloper’s victory did surprise me. When asked who would win, my response invariably had been “Hillary Clinton,” though my estimate of her as a candidate was low. Nonetheless, my reaction was less visceral than for most. I didn’t rend my garments, don sackcloth, and cover myself in ashes.
The question then is why the stunned-disbelief meter was turned to eleven for millions. Armchair psychologizing to me is abhorrent – it’s impossible to be in others’ heads – but I have suspicions about the sort of person who found The Prince of Mendacity’s victory existentially crushing. The dejection perhaps was keenest among those who see a political contest as a boxing match that, while inherently brutal, at least plays lip service to Marquess of Queensbury rules. Sometimes this is indeed the reality. Yet the political fray is often akin to professional wrestling where rules are honored in their breech. This can have appeal. Was it coincidence that The Small-Handed One has performed in World Wrestling Entertainment shtick? Who can forget his retweeting of a video in which he administered an outside-the-squared-circle pummeling to CNN in effigy? Many Democrats deem such political messaging as so far beyond the pale that they cannot comprehend how any voter pulls the lever for a candidate not just embracing but reveling in it. If these voters exist – I’m convinced they do – they may overlap considerably with people comfortable with the neoliberal political consensus in which one party refashioned itself into a less vivid version of the other in order to win a few elections, long-term consequences be damned. When Mr. Down Escalator lifted the veil on the base impulses festering within the GOP, horror ensued. This willful self-deception, unfortunately, feeds the impulse to stuff the genie back into the bottle and resurrect the more comfortable status quo ante, to tolerate the dog whistle so long as the bullhorn is silenced.
Whatever the wellspring may have been for this mass anguish, there were reasons, substantial ones, not to be gobsmacked by the election’s outcome. Brevity of political memory likely had bearing on this dumbstruck disbelief. The 2004 election hadn’t receded that far into the past. Had people forgotten that Bush the Younger prevailed both popularly and electorally, despite his deficiencies, his hollow promise of “compassionate conservatism,” and his war of choice heading south?
Had the Electoral College’s infernal magic been shoved down the memory hole by 2016? Even if many of 2016’s voters had been politically disengaged in 2000, there were more recent reminders of the Electoral College’s anti-democratic proclivities. Irony of ironies, for a time in 2012 some conservatives hyperventilated from fear that Barack Obama would lose popularly but win electorally. A conservative acquaintance fulminated about it: “They have to get rid of that damned Electoral College business.” A casual observer, moreover, should have been cognizant of the GOP’s fading ability to muster a popular majority in presidential elections. After Bush the Elder’s victory in 1988, the only Republican candidate to manage it was his son in 2004. These realities should not have been beyond the ken of an informed citizen in 2016. Since then, the Republican Party’s comfort with an Electoral College strategy, indeed its reliance on it, has been evident in its efforts to tinker with the 2020 Census and thereby alter the Electoral College’s math yet further in favor of Republican-leaning states, to say nothing of its broad campaign to making voting more difficult.
Had these horrified Democrats forgotten how disdain for mainstream candidates can spur voters to cast ballots imprudently? Support for an outsider’s bid can have disproportionate impact on an election’s outcome but it stands virtually no chance in a two-party system of effecting the change for which the disgruntled voter yearns. The quixotic quality of insurgent presidential campaigns is beyond contestation. Ross Perot’s candidacies represented the recent highwater mark for an outsider. He took 18.9 percent and 8.4 percent of the popular vote in 1992 and 1996 without garnering a single Electoral College delegate. Ralph Nader did even less well (2.74 percent) in 2000. Jill Stein (1.07 percent) and Gary Johnson (3.28 percent) occupied this lane in 2016 and the result speaks for itself. Whether any of these candidates was a spoiler is debatable; however, it is practically assured in the existing electoral system that a Democrat or a Republican will occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Unless someone is an accelerationist – convinced that the path to Utopia requires making life miserable enough to jar the electorate from its torpor – the rational act is to vote for the less objectionable major party candidate regardless of the unpalatable choices on offer. As I tried to explain to some Nader voters after the 2000 debacle, a third party’s only avenue to national electoral pay dirt is cycle after cycle of grassroots organizing and still its prospects will remain dim so long as the Electoral College exists. Casting a ballot for a protest candidate is emotionally satisfying but strategically worthless. My votes for Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000 were nose-holding exercises. My enthusiasm for John Kerry in 2004 was minimal. My ballots marked for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 were ultimately disillusioning. Yet in each instance it was the right thing to do.
Beyond these historical and political realities, personal experience in 2016 gave me pause. As 4 July approached, The Better Half was out of town but I maintained our custom of spending the holiday in Portsmouth-Norfolk. On my drive there, a Williamsburg exit brought to me a Starbucks for a coffee-and-newspaper pitstop. Four middle-aged couples wearing MAGA gear then parked themselves in the café. Their boisterousness rendered eavesdropping unnecessary. They were exercised by a recent event, Bill Clinton’s excellent adventure on 27 June, barely a week earlier, when he had dashed across an airport tarmac to bend the ear of Attorney General Loretta Lynch while his wife’s use of personal email accounts and a private server was under investigation by the Justice Department. For the MAGA coffee-klatsch, this was indisputable evidence of a rigged probe. FBI Director James Comey’s scolding of Hillary Clinton without bringing charges a couple of days later (5 July) likely crystalized their suspicions. In any event, La Clinton’s slim opportunity to persuade such voters was lost. These people had been propagandized by right-wing media and were mired in the conspiracy-theory bog. For them, as for the columnist Maureen Dowd’s brother, Ms. Clinton was Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones incarnate, scheming malevolence personified. It’s noteworthy that these MAGA people seemed materially comfortable. They were not among the despairing, downtrodden lumpen masses. They in fact were comparing their DNA results. One acknowledged his not inconsiderable Neanderthal heritage. Hmm.
Living in the Old Dominion since mid-2001 and returning frequently to the Bluegrass have perhaps inoculated me against emotional desolation from displeasing political outcomes. Sojourns in Kentucky remind me of how far right the electorate in some places has moved, so far that these states are no longer active players in the Electoral College’s perverse calculus. Virginia’s politics since 2001 have been a practicum on the long, difficult slog of a state moving from nearly total GOP control – both US Senate seats, the governorship, the lieutenant governorship, the attorney general’s office, both chambers of the General Assembly – to parallel Democratic ascendancy in 2019. The configuration of the Commonwealth’s electoral districts is so partisan that it took not bare but substantial majorities to establish Democratic hold on the House of Delegates and the Senate, the Electoral College’s inherent gerrymander in microcosm.
My first coherent, substantial writing on the 2016 debacle was inspired by a friend living abroad. Parenthetically, every citizen should have the privilege of observing an American presidential contest while overseas, as I did in 1992 and 2000. On one hand, being insulated from wall-to-wall coverage of interminable primary and general campaigns is pleasant. On the other, few experiences are as mortifying as sitting among non-Americans for the 1992 Bush-Clinton-Perot presidential debates and especially for the Quayle-Gore-Stockdale vice presidential chin-wagging. How could educated, attentive outsiders not ask themselves, “Is this the best on offer from the globe-bestriding military, political, economic, and cultural hegemon?” The foreign viewpoint is an antidote to American self-involvement and self-regard. In 2000, as the disputed election ground on and on, an impish Italian television journalist quipped that another day had passed without an American president-elect and the world was somehow surviving. Furthermore, foreigners’ engagement in our elections indicts as apathetic the tens of millions of Americans who neglect to exercise their right. Because of America’s outsize international influence, for good or ill, many would dearly love to mark a ballot in our elections and cannot comprehend how Americans can be cavalier about it.
Anyway, this old friend, like many, could not get her head around the result and asked my wife how a majority of white women could bring themselves pull the lever for Mr. Genital Grabber. She also wanted recommendations for articles that might bring into focus what had happened. She Who Must Be Obeyed relayed the queries to me. The email reproduced below, composed several days following the election, encapsulates what I was thinking then. Like any political opinion, time proved some of it wrongheaded while other bits hit the mark. It mostly holds up, though J. D. Vance continues to wane in my regard – more about that later. The Light of My Life, as is her wont, passed this along to a few people.
Aside from a paragraph excised because it touches on family matters, here’s the dispatch to our friend across the water. . .
Dear —–,
Joanna asked [me] to say something useful about what’s happened in god’s own country over the past few days. This email is no doubt far more than what you wanted and you are under no obligation to read any of it but I would have been scribbling something like this in my journal in order to come to terms with this dire, loveless, dispiriting election, so I might as well share it with someone. As Joanna has probably told you, I had a particular point of view regarding the election. I was a Bernie Sanders supporter because I felt Hillary Clinton was a poor choice in equal measures in reference to her political skills, her fundamental impulses, and the considerable Clinton baggage. I have also developed over the years fundamental philosophical differences with the Clintons. I was convinced that, as a candidate, she offered the Republicans and Trump in particular the best path to Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a reason why there were seventeen of those clowns in the Republican primaries and it wasn’t because she was a strong candidate.
As far as why so many white women voted for Trump, I don’t think there’s a simple, one-size-fits-all answer. For many women who are already Republicans, the false equivalence drawn between Hillary Clinton’s flaws and Donald Trump’s moral bankruptcy was likely adequate to concoct a sufficient rationalization for voting for him; they concluded that La Clinton was not less corrupt than Trump – even that she was actively evil – and that, even when they found Trump’s comments personally offensive, Clinton didn’t offer enough of a reason to abandon the tribal orthodoxy of the party. There are many women who will never be able to bring themselves to vote for a Democrat and especially for a Clinton. There may also have been a cognizance among these Republican women that the Republicans, as a shrinking minority party if demographic analyses are to be believed, need as much support as possible from numbskulls and unsavory people and his offensive speech was tolerable so long as it motivated ignoramuses to vote for him. One commentator I read expressed this in an interesting way: Trump’s supporters took his rants seriously but not literally while the press and elites in both parties took Trump literally but not seriously, at least initially, and this created the space for him to establish momentum. Beyond this, many women across the socioeconomic spectrum do accept the proposition that Trump’s misogynistic language merely reflects how most men communicate with one another when women aren’t around.
For women who aren’t Republicans and who even are from families that have voted Democratic for generations, the willingness to vote for Trump in great measure can be placed at the feet of the Democratic Party. In my view – this is something that Joanna has listened to me rail about for years and is thoroughly and justifiably sick of hearing – the party has been heading in a bad direction for decades and the Clintons and “Clintonism” have added impetus to this since the mid-nineties. The Democratic Leadership Council’s strategy of moving to the center and then even further right as the Republican Party progressed in its derangement yielded some political victories but the price was the party’s soul and principles. Working-class voters gradually concluded that they had lost their main champion and, sad to say, I don’t think they’re wrong. When someone is feeling acute economic distress, a demagogue (Trump) can operate effectively and an outsider of good conscience and aspirational message (Sanders) can also gather a following. Hillary Clinton, unfortunately, is the model for an establishment technocrat, the cold policy wonk who has little or no connection with the lives many people lead and the challenges with which they cope every damn day. Hillary Clinton offered nothing aspirational whereas Trump gave simple, emotionally satisfying answers to people’s sense of displacement, presented them scapegoats at which to direct their seething discontent, and offered himself as a near messianic figure uniquely capable of giving them succor when neither party establishment seemed to give a rat’s ass about them. When people are angry and suffering and feeling forgotten, they have little patience for niceties of tolerance and standards of politically-correct expression. Bernie Sanders could perhaps have channeled this rage toward some constructive reforms but we’ll never know that now. I suspect my frustration is showing. To paraphrase a far better writer than I am, the Democratic Party in its best days would afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted whereas now it tends mostly to confirm its elite membership in its preconception of its merited superiority and is left to ask itself why these grubby little people didn’t vote the way its elite knows they should have voted. I can also speak from some personal experience that many of these voters have a keen sense that the educated bi-coastal elite, of which you and I and almost everyone in our acquaintance are card-carrying members, looks down its collective nose at them. They feel our condescension and it motivates them to pull further into their shells and dismiss anything we might have to say. None of this is to suggest that they did the right thing in voting for the Donald – they certainly didn’t- or that they should be excused for their bigotry and willed ignorance – they certainly should not – but it’s not too difficult to have some empathy for their frustration. I am frigging frustrated myself.
I don’t whether Joanna has mentioned this to you, but, in case she hasn’t, I made a trip to a verdant corner of Trumplandia (the lovely Commonwealth of Kentucky) during the weekend before the election to visit my mother and my brother Ron and his new family (second wife and her two daughters from her previous marriage). My time in the Bluegrass mostly confirmed much of what I’ve mentioned above. On a positive note, my mother told me when I arrived that she was voting for Hillary Clinton. Her main reason was Trump’s absence of experience in foreign policy, a mildly surprising rationale. She found his statements about “taking their oil” deeply problematic. My mother can be really aggravating sometimes but she has a solid moral core that leads her to make good decisions in elections. Good for Mom. She also mentioned that, although she’s pro-life, she can’t accept the absence of exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. During this presidential campaign, she’s been fairly courageous in her own way. At the Southern Baptist church she attends, virtually everyone is voting for Trump, among them most of her closest friends. Some of them have told her that no woman should ever be president, an attitude that emanates from the pulpits of many Southern Baptist churches. When I was growing up, the theme of the Fathers’ Day sermon was invariably how the wife should happily submit to the headship of the husband. A corollary to this of course is that no woman should ever be in a position of authority over a man. I have heard many Baptist preachers fulminate on how the emergence of women from the household into the public sphere has been the source of every social ill in America. These attitudes are far from dead in some parts of the country. Couple this with the conviction that La Clinton is the Whore of Babylon, then pulling the lever for Trump becomes very easy for these women.
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In terms of things you might want to read, books have set forth the complexities of the situation better than articles. The best polemic on the Democratic Party’s meandering path away from its values is Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? There are several books that offer good explanations for why so many voters feel angry and abandoned. Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism examines the way the fruits of economic recovery have been distributed (maldistributed ?) and makes some practical suggestions about how income inequality can be addressed. In the paperback edition, there’s a table on p. 162 that illustrates better than anything I’ve seen why so many people feel left behind. A popular and in some respects beautiful book that has hit the bestseller lists is J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Vance is a conservative politically; however, his description of his experience growing up in eastern Kentucky and Ohio rings very true to me. A legitimate criticism is his undervaluing of the racism of some of the people he describes; nonetheless, he offers a good portrait of the cultural circumstance in which Trump’s message resonates. He’s become a popular talking head on every cable news network regardless of its political slant. An excellent, somewhat Thompsonesque account of the misery in the rustbelt is Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: an American Autopsy. A good and frightening assessment of the Sisyphean task confronting the Democratic party if it wishes to return to the electoral promised land is David Daley’s Ratfucked: the True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy. It deals with the Republicans’ successful efforts to gerrymander states and create quasi-permanent majorities for themselves. It’s depressing. The Republicans have been playing three-dimensional chess while the Democrats have been barely in the game. The outcome of the election is not going to improve the Democrats’ prospects. As you know, the backlash against elites is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Owen Jones, a very smart guy who writes for The Guardian, assesses the demonization of working people in the United Kingdom in The Establishment. I’ll stop here since this is beginning to look like a reading list for general exams.
On a fun note, I have a musical recommendation for you and especially for Paul. I don’t know whether Joanna has mentioned this to you, but I have for years been a huge fan of an outfit called the Drive-By Truckers. They are sort of Americana/Alternative Country/Southern Rock. They come to Richmond on every tour and I attend their shows if I’m around. In fact, I took my brother to one of their concerts in Lexington, Kentucky, just days before the 2012 election. They played this past Friday in Richmond and I planted myself about eight feet away from the center of stage and refused to move. It was a fantastic show. They are touring in support of their new album – An American Band – which is being compared in its timeliness to Green Day’s American Idiot. The Truckers were in fact Colbert’s musical guest on The Late Show on the night of the election and that was no coincidence. The album is fantastic and the Truckers did a full live performance of it for NPR and it’s available online. They also did one of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. In these strange, disturbing times, it’s a comfort to see some good art pushing back against deepening philistinism.
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Yours warmly, David
In the paragraph excised from the email, there was a buried gem worth excavating and presenting here. While I was in the Bluegrass, some sentiments were expressed piecemeal and unironically in my presence regarding the value and consequences of higher learning: “. . .college-educated people are snobs, academic types barely work for a living, these people are no smarter or better informed than anyone else, college is just not as hard as it used to be, these people will mislead you if not lie to you, etc., etc.”
That just about says it all. The strange wisdom one gains through travel, so broadening.