On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-HR Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
“Game, set and match to Trump”, said one of his biggest supporters, Elon Musk. If you do subscribe to the idea that Trump is, to use Mencken’s words, ‘a downright moron’ then ask yourself why the ‘smarter’ Democrat party has lost twice to him now.
This is not a comprehensive analysis of the US election, but rather brief themes for lessons we might draw for Irish politics north and south, given, that with the exception of Westminster elections in Northern Ireland, we run on multi party systems.
Demographics is not destiny
This is a favourite theme of mine over the years, since the very first year of Slugger in fact. It’s a trap which is very easy to fall into if your eye is too narrowly focused on a subset of data but are not paying enough attention to what voters on the ground are telling you.
In recent times the Democratic party got caught up with a notion that because in 2008 it had huge votes in minority ethnic communities and those minorities were growing at a faster rate than whites, eventually the Democrat vote would outbreed Republican vote.
This, it turns out, is as racist as it is Bullsh!t. Demographic measures show us how populations shift. They help elected politicians to move policy to meet societal change. Demography is important but it cannot (and never could) predict political change.
Trump in each of his races for the White House has thrown electoral switches in most major ethnic groups (including working class whites). The transformation of Ohio from blue under Obama to solid red for Trump and most lately in the Rio Grande valley.
Democrat surrogates described Trump’s 2016 win as a victory for racists when it included people who had twice voted for Obama. Sure, good ole boys lined up for him, but they never defined his appeal. It just accelerated Dem decline in working class votes across divides.
Demographics are not linear, and people don’t stay where you last left them four, eight or even 12 years before. This is the delusion that’s sinking Irish unity in Ireland. Talking instead of building leaves Irish Republicans stranded within the old frame of partition.
Not only are demographics not destiny but people really resent being told how to vote based on their identity. Many will respond positively to such appeals, but not everyone will stay put if they believe their personal interests require a different political choice.
Successful parties operate as coalitions of liberals and conservatives
The US there are things that make Europeans uneasy. Its high levels of inequality by European standards are uncomfortably extreme. Most Europeans are more comfortable with Democrats even though their politics register as centre right in Europe.
In the 20th century both Republican and Democrat Presidents played a role in developing policy to ameliorate inequality. The late C19 saw the Gilded Age give rise to rural populism in the marginalised Democrat south, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Bullmoose Republicans.
Beyond the messy foreground of who won and who lost towards the long arc of American politics laid out in Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld called The Hollow Parties. You also see how common purpose has been subsumed in the Mindf*ck of digital politics.
Hollowness, we argue, is the condition that makes sense of contradictory tendencies. Hollow parties are parties that, for all their array of activities, demonstrate fundamental incapacities in organising democracy.
As a civic presence in an era of nationalised politics, hollow parties are unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives. Organisationally they tilt towards nationally at the expense of local ones.
Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue that properly functioning political parties become a sort of living bridge between locality (where all of us are at our most knowable and most ordinary) and the national capital where key decisions over resources are made.
One of the most popular of Texas’s governors Coke Stevenson was in the same Democratic party (and a huge rival of) as his chief in the Senate election of 1948, Lydon Johnson. If Stevenson was a fiscal conservative it was to the end of delivering better public services.
The movement of both major US parties towards sharper ideological division has helped alienate an historic alliance between two seemingly contradictory propensities within our political imaginations: how can we make things better than they are; and will it work?
So we get a manic depressive (or bipolar) politics where spectacle is all and reality an illusion. So Dearborn’s Arab Americans punished Democrats for being wrong regardless of outcome and they get an Ambassador to Israel who doesn’t believe Palestinians exist.
Schlozman and Rosenfeld identify this as a politics of listlessness, where para-party groups with a single issue focus disrupt the party’s key function as a bridge between local and national interests in favour of a third (often abstract culture war) focus and kill the deal.
If there is an advantage to the Trump era (due to time out finish in four years) it has been an influx of disillusioned conservatives from the Republicans to the Democrats and they have tough truths over the tin ear the Dems turned to a large part of the country.
Former Republican Tom Nichols argues that no one hates the rural poor more than Republican reps do, yet the Democrats seem incapable of even faking concern for the rural population (LBJ grew up in the poorest parts of the west highlands in Texas).
To hold enough power to press for effective government you can’t just be a party of the cities, the suburbs, degree educated or exclusively of the left as some in Ireland have tried to do. Ignoring the rural vote (as the SDLP has) just hands your opposition an easy pass.
When media bubbles burst, things can shift disastrously…
Dublin based Conor Fitzgerald noted the following just after that Biden debate that led to his resignation that…
…just because a particular point of view is presented back at you repeatedly by the magic mirror of the media doesn’t mean that it’s true; and that there will come a point where a concrete price has to be paid for pretending something is true that is verifiably isn’t.
There are some of his team still complain that Biden would have won if he’d continued. However clever you are (and the Democrats spent an awful lot of money on some very clever people), as Derek Mooney has noted the job is to bring the real world into politics.
In his ‘Feeling Numb’ post election podcast Mooney highlights a TV ad with the kicker “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you”. It’s a joke aimed at her inclusion of the pronouns she/her on her Twitter profile. But it’s the wider message that lands cleanly.
That ad was broadcast everywhere politics normally isn’t. It cracked the shell of what was a necessarily thin campaign for Harris who had just over 100 days to catch up with Trump and make her mark. It got her and it got her party’s drift from its historical mission.
This lack of anchoring in community arises from a general trend of centralisation of politics which affects all parties whether of the right or the lest. It means that party operations have become top down affairs, and the contests fought over who has the best marketing.
One of the tight Senate races where the Dems held on was that of one term Senator Jacky Rosen in Nevada. Schlozman and Rosenfeld offer the Democrat’s state organisation there as an example of an organisation possessed of “the feeling and energy and flow of work”.
In contrast of Missouri a fairly cosmopolitan ‘flyover’ state that was a Bellwether until 2004 has since resisted the charms of any democrat candidate: “where party foot soldiers once worked year round contacting only now happens when the electoral calendar demands”.
How can you anchor into reality if all you ever measure is media performance and remote quantitative figures from a polling industry too many use to feed their own dreams (and, perhaps, other people’s nightmares) and a media afraid to draw obvious conclusions.
Fitzgerald again on the issue of the non reporting of Joe Biden’s mental acuity…
…a masterpiece example of how the press cover a story they don’t want to cover. The first step is if at all possible don’t report on it; if you have to, put factual reporting in the opinion pages so it can be falsely dismissed as a subjective take.
When it would be embarrassing not to cover the story as real news, the next option is some mixture of “teach the controversy” (in America this is the “Republicans pounce” approach), and to cover without drawing the obvious conclusions or linking to other publicly known information that is what makes the story notable and worth reporting in the first place.
Embarrassingly, he states, this self censorship leaves the like of Joe Rogan and Infowars in a better place to narrate reality than many in the mainstream too terrified to speak the truth to the power they’d prefer to win. This is a commonplace in Northern Ireland.
As playwright Gary Mitchell pointed out some years ago, when the “agreed truth becomes accepted, the real truth becomes a lie”. Put another way, we all live in epistemological bubbles, not just those whose views we don’t like. It takes effort (and humility) to get out.
Confusing progressivism with progress
The democrats mistook being progressive for offering actual progress for the voters it assumed was a key element to its electoral base. The first is a limp adjective, the second can be a verb (what you plan to do) and a noun (evidence that what you’ve done worked).
It’s easier to pass a law conferring rights to some minority group and convince yourself you’ve done something useful, but hard to put a policy together that makes a critical difference to voters lives. Since 1980 the US right tried (and failed) to cut government.
It also brought in reforms to benefit big business, the finance industry, and the rich, whilst fuelling the fastest and biggest increase in income inequality in the 100 years between 1920 and 2020 whilst median household incomes stagnated and median wages declined.
And all the time the Democrats just went along with it. Now they’ve been bested by a transactional marketing genius (ie, Donald Trump) who is offering eye watering tariffs on Chinese goods that account for a large chunk of Christmas sales in Walmart, Target etc..
Tom McTeague writing in Unherd yesterday frames it well in terms of the recent against trend victory of the UK Labour Party in Britain. Starmer’s landslide is wafer thin in the margins precisely because his core pitch was material progress not progressivism.
…those close to Starmer see Kamala Harris’s crushing defeat not only as a personal rejection, but also an ideological repudiation of the kind of progressivism she came to represent.
In their view, Harris’s brand of “be more woke” liberalism is just as antithetical to the voters Labour needs here as it was to the voters the Democrats needed across the Atlantic.
Talk of minority rights only ignores the needs of those struggling to keep a roof above their heads. It sets individualist entitlement above the solidarity the left once worked hard to bring into action. They need evidential progress, not progressive promises.
Perhaps the second election of Trump as President signals that an era of pretences is ending? What replaces it is down to whether his opponents want to re-shoulder the burden of doing the hard (and unpopular) things that improve the lives of the ordinary.
They chart a journey from the tribalism and gross inequality of the gilded age to ‘comity’ of the New Deal era and back again to polarising tribalism. Recovery, if it happens, will be slow, and periodically reversed. And possible only if we can think of it.
The pretence of caring about the fate of others is not enough. There will be a bill to be faced for a better future often promised and, at least after my own boomer generation was done with milking most of the benefits, rarely delivered.
We need other people and other people need us. Time for all of us to get real and get serious about all our futures (economic, social and environmental) together, not just those of the wealthy.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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