A Status Quo Election
Our long national nightmare is not over.
NYT columnist David Brooks laments, “The Election Is Happening Too Soon.”
I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.
That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.
In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics. When certain sociological and cultural realities are locked in, there is not much politicians can do to redirect events. The two parties and their associated political committees have spent billions this year, and nothing has altered the race. The polls are just where they were at the start. If you had fallen asleep a year ago and woke up today, you would have missed little of consequence, except that it’s Kamala Harris leading the blue 50 percent of the country now and not Joe Biden.
While I have had similar fantasies going back to 2016, they’re not realistic.
First, none of the candidates who’ve run against Donald Trump—Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris—are charismatic, transformative leaders by presidential standards. Barack Obama was and, if anything, the divide deepened and sharpened on his watch. I had some hope that Biden, a decent man with half a century of close, personal relationships on Capitol Hill, could have at least bridged the gap a little among the governing class but that, too, was foolish.
Second, Trump himself is a common denominator. While I keep hoping people will get tired of his act and come to their senses, a huge swath of the country thinks he’s their one hope of getting their country back. And, even by the ain’t beanbag standards of political campaigning, he’s incredibly polarizing.
Third, none of the issues that have divided us have been resolved. There are deep divisions on cultural issues that will likely resolve themselves, likely in a leftward direction, over time. Right now, though, everything from immigration to abortion to LGBTQ rights seem like existential issues to both sides.
Fourth, the information environment that stokes these divisions has, if anything, gotten more targeted since 2016. Everyone chooses their own media sources and algorithms push content that plays to the particular fears and prejudices of each individual to devices we carry with us at all times. It’s been a long time since news was confined to 30 minutes a day with a Walter Cronkite telling us “That’s the way it is . . . ” and having everyone accept that as a fact.
Brooks draws a conclusion that’s almost certainly too stark:
It’s clearer to me now that most of the time politicians are not master navigators leading us toward a new future. They are more like surfers who ride the waves created by people further down in the core society.
While I’m not a proponent of the Great Man Theory of History, I believe leadership matters. Indeed, had Trump not appeared, things would be considerably different. While the Republican Party of 2016 was not that of Ronald Reagan, much less George H.W. Bush, it’s quite likely that either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would have won the nomination. While they’ve both shown themselves to be spineless in the face of Trump’s leadership, neither would have inspired a cult of personality and, had they beaten Clinton and won the presidency, they would have governed as more or less Normal Republicans. The personal corruption, cozying up to foreign autocrats, incompetent staffing, and all the rest wouldn’t have happened. And, had they lost re-election bids in 2020, they would have dutifully and graciously conceded and helped Joe Biden or whoever conduct a smooth transition.
Brooks does some historical analysis that’s mildly interesting but neither here nor there in terms of the present moment. He uses it to pivot to this:
Today we face another great civilizational question: How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?
I don’t see any cultural movement akin to the social gospel movement of the 1890s. The libraries groan with books diagnosing our divisions, but where is the new social ideal? Where is the set of values that will motivate people to put down their phones and dedicate their lives to changing the world?
Some days I do think the civic revival part of the formula is coming along nicely. Through my work at Weave: The Social Fabric Project, I meet local leaders who are striving to rebuild solidarity and serve the marginalized at the neighborhood level. But so far these kinds of efforts have not been able to reverse the catastrophic decline of social trust. Our nation still lacks the sense of social and psychic safety that would allow us to have productive conversations across partisan difference. We still lack a national creed or a national narrative that would give us common ground among competing belief systems.
But we’re not polarized at the neighborhood level. The divide is regional and metropolitan versus suburban and rural.
While I’m not sure there was ever a time when there was a strong sense of commonality across those divides, I do agree that it has become harder to have honest conversations. Again, though, I blame the information environment. Going back at least thirty years now, we’ve been in Permanent Campaign mode. Leaders who reach out to those on The Other Side and attempt compromise will be pilloried mercilessly, likely by both sides. It takes enormous courage to seek to bridge gaps in that milieu and it’s in incredibly short supply among our political class.
David French is more hopeful, at least in as much as the institution & processes ability to survive a second trump coup attempt, when he loses.
In a column in the WaPo last week Matt Bai asked the question, do R polls really want to follow trump down the rabbit hole and attempt a coup if he is rejected at the ballot box? He gave a number of good and selfish reasons why the shouldn’t. When you think about it, why would any R princeling that fancies themselves the parties next prez candidate support a second coup attempt. To do so will only cede the future leadership of the party to Vance, who may never relinquish it.
If trump wins, watch and listen how quickly chatter about 25th Amendment solutions begin being discussed on the right.
But yes, we are living in interesting times.
I had some hope that Biden, a decent man with half a century of close, personal relationships on Capitol Hill, could have at least bridged the gap a little among the governing class but that, too, was foolish.. Not even a good and decent man can bridge a gap when the other side persistently negotiates in bad faith and the mainstream media takes a dive by failing to point out that bad faith and the hypocrisy that underlies it. No finer example than Republicans howling about the debt/deficit and then implementing tax cuts that make the “problem” worse. Brooks and his ilk routinely take a both sides are to blame approach, and implicitly excuse themselves from the failure to point out that one party has been chipping away at the edifice of our democracy for at least 25 years (see SCOTUS’ ridiculously partisan decision in Bush v Gore). Trump didn’t start the divide, but he has certainly worked hard to increase it, aided and abetted by the entirety of the GOP. Brooks et. al., look at the result and wonder why the *Dems* are so unwilling to reach across the aisle.
@TheRyGuy: Ultimately, norms and institutions matter more than policies, which are fleeting.
As to the policies, though,
These are the same thing, no? And Trump increased it by giving tax cuts to high earners.
Biden ended our involvement in Afghanistan. We’re not in a major war for the first time in 20 years.
Both of which increased hugely under Trump (and, yes, Biden)
I don’t know which ones, in particular, are “excessive” but which ones did Trump eliminate in his four years as President?
Not exactly within the President’s purview but it certainly increased considerably under Trump over what it was when he took office.
The numbers have been remarkably steady for years.
etc.
@TheRyGuy:
Physician, heal thyself. Stop pretending you care about policy
Biden ended the “endless” Afghan War. He is the first president this century to have no tranche of deployed US combat brigades. For this, you MAGA give him no credit. Why? Because you don’t care about “endless foreign wars.”
Biden raised taxes on the rich, Trump cut taxes for billionaires. Dems push to raise the minimum wage, conservatives block it. Dem presidents reduce deficits more, create far more jobs. Yet you’re still an obedient little Republican sheep. Why? Because you don’t care about “wealth concentration” or “debt and deficits.”
You’ve never uttered a word of protest about Republicans banning books and Pride flags, injuring and killing women with forced birth, or attacking Disney. Why? Because you don’t care about “excessive government regulation.”
Biden was poised to sign a bipartisan border bill negotiated by a conservative Republican Oklahoma senator, endorsed by Border Patrol. Senile Don killed it, yet you say nothing. Why? For the same reasons Republicans didn’t pass a border bill under Trump: you’re a phony who does not care about “out-of control illegal immigration.”
Here’s a video of a spry 81-year-old Biden jogging towards reporters then towards Air Force One yesterday. Biden looks as vigorous here as he must’ve been when negotiating the bipartisan infrastructure bill Trump failed to at, or when brokering the Russian and Chinese hostage releases Dementia Donald could not.
78-year-old morbidly obese rapist Trump would die of a heart attack if he tried jogging ten feet. He’s canceling interviews, sleeping and zoning out at events, rambling incoherently, ranting about Hannibal Lecter and golfer dick.
Yet you and rightwing media keep lying about Trump’s “physical and mental decline.”
Trump is the fault of you hypocritical frauds who support him. Not James Joyner or anyone else who opposes him.
And you support Trump not because of any of the fake policy excuses you don’t care about. You support Trump because he’s your twin: a mean, unpatriotic, insecure, fascist liar consumed by hate and bitterness. Pretty simple.
Trump’s brains are melting out of his ears and RyGuy is still whining about Biden acting like a healthy 80-year-old.
David Brooks, with his decades of being a Republican concern troll, did as much as anyone to create this mess. Now, like many of his co-conspirators, he’s living in fear of the monster he helped create. But he’ll never address how he helped create it.
There is a change happening. Coupled with the realignment of the parties and things will be different going forward.
The Progressive Moment Is Over
Four reasons their era has come to an end.
RUY TEIXEIRA, OCT 24, 2024
@TheRyGuy: I think it’s pretty revealing that actual policy isn’t worth mentioning for James Joyner. Income inequality, wealth concentration, endless foreign wars, deficit and debt, excessive government regulation, letting men compete in women’s sports, out-of-control illegal immigration, etc.
This sounds like the kind of slippery slope that might end up with a positive defense of Trump. Surely this is the moment! I think everybody here is all ears to find out what you find “positive” about this Trump fellow! (Though I think you might want to know: wealth concentration and inequality are massively exacerbated by tariffs.)
Biden did bridge the gap a little. Less than ten months in he got the mythical bipartisan infrastructure bill done. He also got Republicans to agree to some modest gun reforms, which is remarkable. Even moreso, he had persuaded Dems to support a conservative border bill.
That bill died because of Traitor Trump, indicating sans Trump there are folks ready to govern, divisions-be-damned.
Two other positive signals: the now-daily drumbeat of Republicans endorsing Kamala Harris, and failure of Trumpy candidates in 2022 without the head Putin-puppet at the top of the ticket.
The stench of electoral loss on Trump himself may not create Brooks’s coveted “national renewal,” but it would deprive the MAGA fire of much oxygen, and thus lower the temperature. Tucker Carlson’s “spank the little girls, daddy” weirdness occasionally catches our attention, but he’s shrunk considerably without his Fox News megaphone.
If a defeated Trump means a return to Obama-era divisions…well, that was a utopia relative to the past decade. (McConnell’s pending disappearance is also a good omen.)
@ptfe:
Incels ain’t got none they can admit to. Trump Republicans are crap on those issues — which, again, he does not care about. The conservatives who care about immigration, the wealth gap, deficits, and helping end the war in Ukraine (by defeating Putin) are endorsing Harris.
Even Liz Cheney is saying Republican abortion bans are too extreme and hurting women. That’s someone on the right who *might* care about incomes, wealth, and excessive government regulation. Families should not be forced into childrearing, typically life’s most expensive endeavor.
The positive case for Trump is “I’m a dishonest neo-Nazi with daddy issues and shady morals, so I like that Trump is a racist liar who praised Hitler, who called for the ‘termination’ of the constitution, and who sexualized his daughter Ivanka.”
They just can’t say so in polite company.
We are seeing quite plainly why rigid bipartism is utterly unhealthy.
@JKB: Ruy Texiera still has subscribers after spending all of 2022 promising a big Latino voter shift + Democratic midterm wipeout that didn’t happen?
Why don’t they just light their money on fire instead?
@Steven L. Taylor:
Indeed. What I see lately about defeating far right parties seems to come down to the center-right, center, and left parties temporarily setting aside differences and uniting against the far right. How does that happen in a two party system?
@gVOR10:
It doesn’t. There is no safety valve in our party system. None.
(Made worse by the minority-rule elements of our system).
David Brooks who? How does that guy hang on to a paycheck in 2024?
The sobering truth we need to recognize is that a very large minority of American citizens are entirely comfortable with some form of dictatorship and this has always been the case.
This may sound harsh, but remember that in 1939, on the brink of WWII 10,000 American citizens packed into Madison Square Garden to salute the Nazis.
In 2016, people could explain way the Trump voters as some anti-establishment revolt, or perhaps due to Hillary’s unpopularity, or whatever.
But over the past decade as the entire Republican party has become fully fascist, those sorts of excuses aren’t possible any more.
Even if Trump himself falls dead tomorrow, DeSantis and Abbot and all the other leaders of the party as still just as committed to minority rule as he is. They may not be as corrupt or vulgar, but they have just as much scorn for democracy and the rule of law, and their movement is fueled by ethnic and cultural hatreds which assert that about a third of Americans are not entitled to human rights and fair play.
This is a long struggle, and we won’t be through it for at least a decade or so.
@James Joyner:
A lot of food producers can now skip FDA inspections if they certify that they would have passed.
This has had no unfortunate side effects like salmonella outbreaks, e. coli outbreaks, listeria outbreaks, etc. I’m going to go make a sandwich with genuine boar’s head meat, romaine lettuce, and onions. Or maybe I’ll just go to McDonalds and pick up a quarter pounder.
@DK:
Has he announced something, or are we just assuming he’ll be dead soon?
There’s a song “you’re gonna outlive Mitch McConnell” that gets stuck in my head a lot.
He’s 78 and that’s pretty late,
pretty soon he’ll be Mc-gone-ell,
You’re gonna outlive Mitch McConnell
It’s not a particularly good song, but it has heart.
@Charley in Cleveland:
Ironically enough, this is almost exactly the argument Glenn Beck made when he went into the bag for Trump against Hillary in 2016. We’ve crossed over into a realm of diametrically opposed worldviews trying to occupy the same physical space. Which side will destroy the other?
[CRT TRIGGER WARNING!!!] We managed to cobble our way back to the antebellum “unity” we’d had in the wake of the Civil War/War of Northern Aggression because in the dark night of our collective soul, we were still mostly bigots. We’ve stretched that string to the breaking point again 150+ years later. What happens when it breaks this time?
Two days ago, Bret Stephens (NYT) recently did an opinion piece “If Trump Wins, Who, or What, Will Liberals Blame?”
I though about this and I came up with this formula for apportioning blame in the event that Trump wins:
33% – Republican Party had the opportunity to convict him in 2021, but they were afraid.
33% – Voters saw what happened the 1st time around, they want more dysfunction.
33% – Democrats who naively believed that common sense and a pervasive sense of PTSD after 9 years of Trump would cause voters to reject Trump.
@Gustopher:
Don’t get the Chicken Big Mac, tho. It’s exactly as mediocre as social media has been reporting it to be. (Though at the store on Burnside in downtown, I got the medium full meal for under $10 until I rounded up for RMHC.)
ETA: In answer to your other question, I think Mitch announced his retirement recently, but I don’t keep track.
How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?
There’s nothing radical going on in America with pluralism and diversity. If you think there is, you’re an idiot. People who believe in this are the same people who had mental breakdowns during Covid because they were being asked to think about other people and their well-being.
Anyway, Brooks talks about this stuff and then he writes about the empirical reality and it’s some person who is being exposed to a fancy sandwich. It’s like whining about how men are being demonized by a culture and then pointing to a bit of rudeness about manspreading and mansplaining and concluding no wonder they vote for Trump and think women shouldn’t work. There have been like four examples of real radicalism in the past eight years, all of which have been at the university-level, and the rest have been crap.
Ha
https://x.com/catturd2/status/1849849723894505651
@Jake: For some reason, a paper owned by a billionaire MOU-type (who apparently believes that all his employees tend to be slackers whom he should and will churn every 5 years or so) deciding not to make an endorsement this year doesn’t seem as surprising to me. Hmmm…
With all due respect, James, Kamala Harris is a leader who is, in this moment, reaching out to The Other Side and who has in turn found common cause with Liz Cheney and her ilk. Yet, you’ve deemed her an insufficiently charismatic, transformative leader[s] by presidential standards in this very post. Sure, you’re not pillorying her, but you’re also not giving her what’s due. (BTW, transformative Obama is out there giving Harris all the charisma he’s got as well.)
I think perhaps the issue is the transformation we need may not be the transformation you seek. Because, the common cause bringing together Harris, Walz, Obama, Cheney, Milley, Kelly, et al, is a claim to the character of the world’s oldest democracy. And not enough of us is willing to say that the 47% of those willing to support Trump are either fascists themselves or comfortable enough with fascism to use it to achieve their minority rule objectives. We have to stop trying to understand where they are coming from as though they might or even can rationalize their depravity. And then we have to condemn them all as the deplorables they are.
Bring back shame.
@just nutha: Does the chicken Big Mac also come with a side of e.coli?
I guess Mitch retiring is fine, but I would rather he just die already. Although I guess waiting for him to die gives some meaning to people’s lives. Life is hard, and it’s a struggle to survive, but don’t you want to outlive Mitch McConnell?
Yeah, that song is just stuck in my head.
@just nutha: The LA Times’ new owner quashed a Harris endorsement too.
The oligarchs are getting a little big for their britches.
@Scott F.:
Clinton’s big mistake. Bret Baier tried to bait Harris into something similar, she evaded.
@Gustopher:
Not really, he will be succeeded by someone worse.
Well, both the Washington Post and the LA Times have declined to make an endorsement for the presidential race.
I get it. The message is very clear: they both fear the election of Donald Trump.
@charontwo: Clinton did not claim “all” Trump voters were deplorables.
She underestimated. Mistake indeed.
@al Ameda: Remember when some naïve folks around here denied media’s rich billionaire owners could possibly be influencing coverage rightward?
Good times.
@charontwo:
Or – stay with me here – Clinton was right and the “mistake” was the media, punditry, and political savvy excoriating her for calling a spade a spade.
@Gustopher: Not based on my experience, but my purchase was pre-Trump gimmick, so well before the latest McD’s headlines.
@charontwo: Worse, but unseasoned and low in the Senatorial pecking order. You need to capitalize on whatever advantage you get.
@Scott F.: Only Drama Queen Donnie gets to insult voters with impunity. So say Jeff Bezos and the other billionaire dipshites who control our media.
@DK:
Case in point, the Speaker of the House and the minority leader of the Senate are out with a statement today claiming Kamala Harris’ rhetoric is dangerous:
So, according to the two highest elected Republicans in the country, Harris calling a fascist a fascist, not by her own assesment, but per the assessments of Republicans from Trump’s first term, is inciting would be assassins. It’s not Trump behaving like a fascist that’s encouraging nut jobs to want to kill him. It’s Harris calling him out. Why don’t
@Scott F.:
I wonder how Dementia Don’s handpicked running mate feels about being misgendered by Speaker Johnson.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
~ JD Vance
@Scott F.:
I discovered years ago that among my county club acquaintances it was a big faux pas to mention that someone was an asshole, far worse than his being an asshole.
@DK: Earlier today I saw someone ask on-line for suggestions as to what JD stands for, serious suggestions not accepted. The standout response was “Jethro Dull”.