Liner Note 2: Trump will be defeated in Tuesday's election

 

Nov 5, 2008, UC Students in Grenoble

In 2016, I was one of the Democrats who was pretty sure that Trump could win.  Then in 2020 I was pretty sure he would lose.  Now I’m back to pretty sure that he will lose in 2024. I have a few reasons, including education, as I’ll explain. 

 

I’m not celebrating the Democrats here. I omit the Biden administration's failures (nicely recapped by Patrick Healy here). I do agree with whoever said, in this good discussion of relations between the anti-war left and the Biden war party, that defeating Trump is not a step that can be skipped.  These are reasons for this defeat.

 

First, there’s the technical issue of the limits of the numerical, meaning the limits of polls, or really the limits of the interpretative tweaking of polls.  The media is too positivist by half, and underplays the importance of the assumptions behind the weighing of the results.  The main thing I’ve heard is that the pollsters are obsessed with not undercounting Trump voters because they have in the past.  So they are likely overcounting Trump voters. Everyone in the media “knows” about weighting, and pollwatchers offer learned discussions, but they still talk as though polls are empirical snapshots. They are not.  The performance of the campaigns isn’t even close. I think the voting will be less close than the polls.

 

Second, Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.  His act is in serious decline: it’s bleak, rancid, and desperate. His escalation into the full Nazi is a sign that he knows he is slipping behind.  Harris and Walz are hugely successful in the arena I don’t really care about but know is important—money, ad buys, sound bites, celebrity endorsements, glamour connections, and other things that may sway many people, including those who don’t see politics as distinct from other forms of entertainment in the unending flow of processed images and sound. Harris and Walz are both very pro, and I think that’s the main cause of Trump’s rising fear.

 

Third, Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.  We are supposed to be in the age of post-reason, where everyone is driven by emotion, affect, and image-created impulse and is also fine with that.  It’s true that Trump seems to command an Orc army in which not one foot soldier has been alienated by his firehose of provably false claims and civil-war inducing curdled vows, like deporting millions of US residents with the military.  But peak outrage is not the state in which people actually live, even the Trump faithful who are carried away at a rally as they might be at a football game.  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. This is a very high number: I’m not minimizing the problem and to the contrary am studying it. But it’s not a spectacle of mass mind-control that cannot be stopped by ordinary politics.

 

Fourth is 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. Since I think that’s where the majority of US voters are, I think this will work to build a majority.  The left will need to work hard to fix Harris-Walz’s timid economic plans and acceptance of Biden’s catastrophically bad foreign policy, with a focus on shutting down Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.  After they win the election.

 

Everything I read says that Harris-Walz have a great ground game and that Trump-Vance don’t have one at all.  They have liars’ circuses, which encourage the media to mistake part for whole and overstate the attending faithful—100 in Austin, 25,000 in New York—as a mass movement.  But on the ground, the education is happening, from house to house. Oliver Laughland reports:

 

I am out with two women, Leslie Hughes and Luwaunna Adams, whom I met two years ago when we were making a video in western Pennsylvania – a perennial battleground region in the US’s closest-fought swing state. . . . As we trudge the streets, knocking doors in the crisp autumn air, we meet a number of apathetic voters who tell the women they are not planning to cast their ballot this time around. One young man named Rashad says he cannot understand how Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote in 2016 and yet lose the election. “If ‘we the people’ chose someone, but the electoral [system] chooses someone else, what’s the point of my vote?” he asks Adams. Another woman says she finds it impossible to discern “which one is good and which one is bad” – and so has decided to sit it out. …

 

But Hughes and Adams do not give up. They stand for 10 minutes with each voter, running through many of the ways Trump failed during his first four years and why, they say, he should not be given another chance. They talk about how their rights as unionised cleaners are on the line. Adams engages in a frank lesson about the power of voting in her home state. “Your vote does count,” she says to Rashad. “You know what time it is.”

 

Both [voters, Rashad and an unnamed woman], are eventually won over and decide to cast their vote for Harris. Adams lets out a cheer of joy. “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you,” she tells Rashad. He agrees: “Especially in this era of brainwash. Everything is just brainwashing you to think a certain way.” He thinks about taking a break from social media.

 

It is a moment of clarification and a reminder of just how distorted reality has become in this election. Conversations like these may well be the only way to bring Pennsylvania, and by default the whole country, back from the brink.

 

Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift.  A second ago you thought this. Now you think that, which may be the opposite.  Your feelings change too. The shift is very different from reacting to words or images. It takes root. It has been interacting with you, your identity, and your life, and isn’t just something you’re skimming through. 

 

It’s hard to talk about this difference. we’ve demystified our binary oppositions between thought and feeling, active engagement and passive reception. We’ve also damaged our understanding of learning vs. watching things, or learning vs. viewing, as part of a tech barrage that ramped up with MOOCs in the early 2010s and has reached a new peak with “AI.” 

 

And yet these things are different.  Active thinking is what we try to achieve in class. It involves internalization, learning that “sticks.” It is recognizably different from rote response—there’s a large established literature on this.  It also happens here on the campaign doorstep.  

 

Luwaunna Adams has the best phrase for it.  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”

 

Basically, I think “thinking for yourself” is going to win.   And therefore so will Harris-Walz. 

 

Then Trump’s ground game will begin, which will involve massive disputation of the election results.  But he will try that because he will have lost the election.