Elections come and go. Political commentary persists. Are the two things even related? Again, over the last weeks, I’ve been confronted by this depressing observation. It hurts more when the election results don’t satisfy me. When my side wins, I can joyfully consume far more commentary than I can stomach with a loss.
Sure, there are always “lessons” to be learned from a loss. And it may be that the subsequent four-plus weeks haven’t provided enough time to achieve the insight needed for an honest, historian’s assessment of the results. I think the data is too mixed at this point. It wasn’t a landslide, after all. But the incessant commentary itself does leave me with some general impressions. Here they are:
- Mainstream Media can’t give me the truth! There is a monotonous drone of opinions all pointing in the same direction – Democrats, and the Harris campaign in particular, somehow needed to reach the working-class voters better (i.e., those without much education). This position assumes the Trump campaign somehow did a better job of that outreach. I’m struck that these pundits give zero support for their contention that working class voters liked Trump more than Harris. I’m not sure I’ve heard any opinion voiced in MSM suggesting voters, in fact, hated Trump, but trusted him more – two feelings I find very consistent! He’s real to many voters because he reminds them of themselves. Harris did not seem so real, just safer for the privileged class.
- Trump’s flurry of cabinet picks is, indeed, trolling the media – as John Fetterman suggested. Evidence for this is the rapid fall of at least two of them, Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth (soon?), with others likely to follow. Fetterman’s comment about “God-tier trolling” came as soon as Matt Gaetz was announced but seems to apply equally to everybody except perhaps Marco Rubio for State. Foreign policy is, after all, extremely difficult to change from one administration to the next. Consistency usually pays dividends here. My money is on Kash Patel or RFK, jr. to pull out next. Although Tulsi Gabbard is considered a Russian asset by some Members of Congress with intel backgrounds.
- Dems (and liberal commentariat’s) call for Armageddon in Trump 2.0 is exaggerated! As much as I hate to admit it, the Republican Party may have a more-or-less accurate assessment of what it takes to survive politically – at least through the next couple election cycles. Yes, we’re talking moderation here. Voters, on the margin, do not want a revolution (or counter-revolution)! Most of us are in the same boat – we have more to lose than gain from drastic change. And most of us can rationally assess our position in society – unlike the “terminally online” minority who tend to create those scare stories about what Trump’s second term, freed from any guardrails, will mean. During the campaign, the Harris camp, and MSM who supported her, may have thought that increasing turnout via inflammatory rhetoric would work to her advantage. It didn’t. The only reason the results were as close as they were was Trump’s campaign was equally sensationalist in its rhetoric (if not more so!). Anyway, I need to believe these things now to give myself some peace of mind.
- There is a grain of truth in the contention that Democrats need to skew a bit more populist – if they want to win. It seems that the Dems (from the top down?) have a hard time understanding who the people are. And I think that the main fault here is that strategists, pollsters, and donors who control the direction of Democratic campaigns have too many biases to give accurate guidance. It used to be different – back when organized labor was a major force in American society. The party then had much closer ties to its supporters than subsequent Democratic-leaning advocacy organizations have provided. Sometimes it seems the “groups” represent a wide cross-section of voters, when taken together, but the problem is they are individually group-specific, more than labor was in days of yore. I know, American society is simply way more diverse now than it was 50-100 years ago. But it sometimes seems that advocacy stresses particularism of separate groups more than unity among all – the key word should be “solidarity,” not diversity! Could it be that Republicans (under Donald Trump, at least) now understand solidarity better than Democrats? And the “working class,” as presently construed, benefits more from that solidarity than it does from particularism or hyper-awareness of diversity – when will Dems understand this? True, the working class is different now than in Marx’s time, but solidarity still makes more sense for a mass movement.
- Working class outreach is one thing, but what about the Rural-Urban Divide? I continue to be baffled by the inescapable fact that many people just don’t like cities. They prefer to live around lots of land, not lots of other people! It doesn’t seem to neatly correlate with income or wealth (at least in 21st century America), nor does it correlate with any historic class structure that Marx would have known. Country people are just more conservative in their world view than city people. More provincial, less cosmopolitan. Of course, I’ve been an urban type as long as I can remember – and I’m sure somebody whose roots were rural would be just as baffled by my proclivities. There will always be a partisan divide between those people with conservative social orientation (land over people) and those with a cosmopolitan orientation (more people living more densely) — unless our two parties can somehow encompass both orientations equally within their coalitions. Right now, it looks like this is more of a challenge for Democrats than Republicans. While it is true that more people will always live in urbanized agglomerations than in the wide-open spaces, the federal system created by our Constitution does favor those less densely populated states. The Electoral College and the Senate are the best examples of this – both anti-democratic institutions at their core. This is America, not Europe. Because of this divide, elections should not be reduced to urban-rural conflict alone. There must be balance with other issues, beyond the cultural.
So, this is where I stand one month after election day. We can try again in 2026, then 2028. I have confidence in a general thermostatic course of political history – at least for the short term. It’s hard for me to think that Donald Trump’s Republican Party will last very far into the future. But Democrats can’t just wait for GOP collapse, they must search for candidates who will better represent the appropriate constituencies. And even if they can’t find all the best candidates, they must tune their rhetoric to what voters want to hear — at least as well as Trump can!
— William Sundwick
Warp and Woof 