Liner Note 3: Why I Was Wrong about Trump's Defeat

November 10, 2016, Columbus, Ohio

 My heart goes out to the tens of millions of people who spent the campaign in Trump’s crosshairs and who will stay there during his four years of chaos to come. Trump’s victory feels very very bad. In the short run there’s no way to avoid mourning and despair, and disorientation.

 

There’s also no way to avoid a gruesome post-mortem.  We can, however, avoid the bad ones that declare a major cultural shift or claim that we now live in Trump’s America.  Both statements are false. 

 

The Pod Save guys note that Trump gained everywhere with all groups.  As of this writing, with votes still being counted, Trump is still a million votes behind his own total of 2020.  The difference is that Harris is still 12 million votes short of Biden’s count; Paul Campos estimates she’ll wind up 8 million behind him. (UPDATE Nov 19: at 74 million votes, Harris remains 7 million votes below Biden's 2020 tally of 81.2 million; at 76.6 million, Trump is now 2.2 million above his 2020 total.) There’s been no national shift to right-wing remedies that weren’t already entrenched in U.S. culture.  It’s important not to collaborate in Trump’s anointment of himself as emperor of a New America.

 

This post is an exercise in avoiding overinterpretation, which is just a first step in a response.  I’ll start with a bit of surgery on my own vision of Trump’s defeat.

 

First, I mentioned the “limits of the numerical” regarding polls, meaning they were wrong. They were, but in the other direction.  I linked to our edited collection with that title, but ignored my own argument there about the Democratic party. I’d argued that Dems in the 1990s had abused the authority of numbers to concoct a claim for the inevitability of deindustrialization.  They used neoclassical modelling to “prove” that the industrial classes objectively had to lose their jobs and middle-class status through offshoring and the rest.  Democrats used models to duck responsibility for their political choice to side with Reaganomics.  The closeness of the 2000 election was another warning to Democrats that the working class wasn’t buying their claim of general prosperity (as 1980, 1984, and 1988 had been). Voters knew the role of Democrats and their experts  in creating the rust belt.  This year they blamed Dems for inflation. Doug Henwood notes that 22% of voters said inflation had caused them severe hardship: “they went for Trump by 50 points.  More than half, 53%, said inflation had caused them moderate hardship. They went for Trump by 6.”

 

There’s a long pattern here. What Clinton and his New Democrats did in the 1990s was done by the Obama administration in 2009-10 when it helped unhouse millions because models and quant-talking bankers said save Wall Street not Main Street. We got the Tea Party in November 2010, and the Democrats have never regained real leverage in Washington. Biden bought himself out of this reality during the first two years but not the last two.

 

In response, I won’t again underplay what I know about political economy, like this history of the Dem’s sacrificial economics from which Kamala Harris didn’t break.  

 

Second, I said “Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.”  This remains true: they were good candidates who held good events where they performed better than I’d expected. But the campaign didn’t turn out their own base, much less win converts.

 

Here I downplayed my knowledge of the effects of the identity of the star of the show. Harris is a Black and South Asian woman, a daughter of immigrants who’d achieved a position of power, influence, and authority over people, including authority over white people.  The MAGA base was always going to reject this embodiment of a social position that makes them generally uneasy if not furiously resentful. A Black woman president may also have been too much for millions of Biden voters, the ones who didn’t turn up for her.

 

Third, I wrote, “Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.” The wording here created a red herring: the command of hatred and resentment is definitely a political power.  

 

I added that Trump “is certainly the choice of the reactionary millions—say the one-third of Americans and the three-fifths of Republicans who agree that immigrants poison the blood of America.”  We can add now exit poll results suggesting, for example, that 40% of all 2024 voters and 87% of Republicans favor deportation for “most undocumented immigrants.”  

 

This is not a surprising America but a familiar one. It has always had to be fought by the Other America. The baseline anti-immigrant conviction gives hard-right candidates a big advantage going in.  Then Harris-Walz fell into the familiar Democratic trap of posing a weaker solution to a Republican-favoring problem whose terms they didn’t try to change.  I knew all this, and should have given it full weight.

 

Fourth, I noted a “contingent semi-harmony among Democrats.  Some people have argued that Harris-Walz have built a majority centrist coalition around women’s rights to safety and respect, post-Dobbs abortion, meaningful environmental policies, supportive government, non-racism (if not active anti-racism), pro-union workplace and wage policies, reduced inequality, and the rule of law.” 

 

There was visible party unity, just not party turnout.  The versions of these unity issues acceptable to “a majority centrist coalition” are also either baked-in or inadequate or both, and thus unable to inspire people to the polls.  I personally dislike centrist coalitional thought, but it would work with the whole Democratic base. It apparently did not.

 

Finally, I smoked the hopium of street education in the form of door-knocking persuasion. 

 

We might think that education was defeated by spectacle and propaganda firehosed through the Republicans’ vast digital media system. That didn’t help. But I think education was defeated by a mass preference for its perennial alternative in America, which is power.  Since education-power (and its failures) is a topic of this blog, I should have put power front and center.

 

I wrote, “Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift” when someone helps you learn or you think through something on your own. I quoted the organizer Luwaunna Adams saying,  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”  I concluded, “Basically, I think ‘thinking for yourself’ is going to win.” 

 

Well, thinking for yourself did win—in a way I’ll qualify in a sec. I don’t like the tone of statement, since it sounds like the sort of thing educated elites always say about the right—that they are feeling, not thinking.  I know that Republicans certainly were thinking.  They were thinking that the economy was bad for them. They were thinking that Biden had done nothing about disorderly immigration while arming chaotic wars. 70% were thinking that the country was going in the wrong direction (Trump won these voters by 34 points).  Democrats were the incumbents and their candidate was defending a status quo that wasn’t working for them. They thought they didn’t need to think more about any of these issues, thank you very much.

 

Now to qualify. Thinking was on the ballot in the 2024 election. 

 

There’s some evidence that “people who hold accurate views on crucial political questions that have empirically verifiable answers overwhelmingly vote for Democrats” (Campos again). For example, there’s clear evidence that “real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) really have risen strongly for the working class in America, and stand substantially higher today than in 2019.”  Trump voters generally think the opposite, and voted on the basis of wrong beliefs.

 

This doesn’t mean that the numbers override or critique peoples’ direct experience of the economy. Their experiences are real, and they teach true things that macroeconomics does not.  But if voters are wrong about the overall picture, they are likely to vote wrong about policy.  Trump’s campaign was an unending carnival of wrong statements about the overall picture, and it systematically miseducated its voters.  

 

Educators in politics, schools, universities, movement organizations, can’t give this problem a populist pass.  We have to design a knowledge system that fixes it. The fix is especially urgent since those voters who most felt capitalism was failing them voted for authoritarian capitalism.  

 

We’ve heard how people are tired of experts, but Trump’s strategy is well beyond this. Trump persuades his followers through the charisma of impunity.  He has impunity specifically in relation to knowledge and to knowledge workers: the judges who insist on accountability to evidence, the climate scientists who show the effects of drill baby drill, the regulators who say crypto needs to be more transparent, the historians who situate his campaign’s racism.  Trump’s power is specifically power over knowledge.  That particular power has to be broken.

 

When we’re feeling better, we’ll figure out how knowledge strikes back.  And strikes with Trump’s non-college base rather than against them.