You Win Some, You Lose Some
A reflection on four decades of presidential elections.
Discussing the outcome of the election with my students, most of whom are 25 years or more my junior, this week, I noted that Wednesday marked the 40th anniversary of my first vote in a Presidential election and Tuesday was my eleventh time voting for President.
For the record, my voting history is Reagan, Bush, Bush, Dole, Bush, Bush, McCain, Romney, Clinton, Biden, and Harris, which makes my record 5-6. Indeed, that’s true whether we’re going by the Electoral College or popular vote since my happiness over Bush squeaking by in 2000 was offset by Trump’s shocking win in 2016.
Over the same span, the straight-ticket Democratic voter would also be 5-6, with Electoral College wins in 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020 and losses in 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2024. The straight-ticket Republican voter, naturally, would be 6-5. It’ll be exactly 20 years each of Republican and Democratic control of the White House between Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration and Trump’s. Caring a lot about American politics, then, has come with being disappointed with the outcome roughly half the time.
Is this time different? Like most of you, I worry that it is. While Trump is clearly more interested in running and winning than in governing, he has displayed increasingly authoritarian tendencies and a shocking lack of regard for the rule of law. I fear that the guardrails—bureaucratic procedure, “normal” Republicans in key administrative posts and Congress, and the judiciary—that reined him in last time will be gone or weakened.
Do I think we’re going to have a reign of terror that deports millions of illegal immigrants and harasses American citizens who “look foreign”? Or literal concentration camps for trans and queer people? I don’t. But it’s likely that we’ll further erode liberal norms and that violence will be employed in service of those aims.
At the same time, the Trump supporters that I follow from my high school and Army days—almost none of whom are anywhere close to as obsessed with the day-to-day of American politics as me—seem to be as elated as we’re concerned. I’m not seeing any of the vitriol that’s getting amplified elsewhere among the Extremely Online. They’re just relieved that the country is back on the right track.
While my politics are considerably less conservative than they were when I voted for Reagan in 1984, or even when I launched OTB in 2003, the reactions this week have again reinforced my conviction that, if millions of American are crying or in gut-wrenching fear as the result of a presidential election (or a Supreme Court retirement/nomination), those offices are too powerful. The shifting of a few thousand votes in a handful of states really shouldn’t have that drastic an impact on our everyday lives.
I sort of agree with your main conclusion.
The first thing I think of is all these state laws outlawing gender-affirming care for minors. Since every single treatment done as gender-affirming care is done in much greater numbers on cis children, this is a clear 14th Amendment violation. Really, it’s textbook. It’s not the treatment that’s the problem, it’s the identity of the person receiving it. This doesn’t even survive “rational basis”, let alone “strict scrutiny”. There are court cases affirming this in Federal Court.
Thing is, I don’t know that I can trust this Supreme Court to rule this way, since they have demonstrated that they are willing to act like legislators and make up law. This is a horrible state of affairs.
Yep, I’ve been on a soapbox about Executive power in particular for a long time now, but the ideologues imagine they are just one election away from a semi-permanent majority, and they want their person who wins to have the maximum authority possible.
But I think the other part of it is that politics seems to be replacing religion and secular civic engagement for a lot of peoples a source of meaning and “action.” I put “action” in scare quotes because the actual action is usually very limited. The typical characteristics I see in this cohort is a lot of time spent online in rhetorical combat with ideological enemies with little or no engagement beyond that. For example, the number of people I know who are like this who have also never written or called their government representatives never ceases to astonish me. Much less volunteer or do other meaningful political work in the real world. For so many it seems that yelling online, catastrophizing and perhaps donating some money is the extent of the effort they are willing to put in, and I really don’t understand that. Same for the many people who obsess with national politics but are completely disengaged with state and local politics to the extent of being annoyed they have to think about it or vote on “confusing” state and local initiatives. I try to think the best of people, but this behavior strikes me as a kind of weird and lazy narcissism.
I think that feature/belief is the most disturbing to me because their “right track” spells less economic mobility, less social mobility, more bifurcation of our society, more capture of wealth by our oligarchs, more destruction of our social fabric, more intolerance, and continuing belief in failed policy solutions: solving immigration problems with walls, homelessness problems with laws against camping, shoving trans and queer people back into closets, coloreds into the back of the bus, and so on.
But it’s still a good time to be old. I don’t have to watch “back on the right track” fail as long as you younger folks do. Or suffer with the consequences, either.
Once the shock of the election had worn off, I started to think of the first election I participated in. I was a sophomore in college (I had been only 17 at the previous election) and a mediocre but thoughtful Democratic president was running against the avatar of reactionary Republicanism — a man so crazy he spent the 60s insisting that Medicare would lead inevitably to Communism and calling for physical violence against protesting youths.
The day after the election, when Reagan not only took the White House but flipped the House for the first time in decades, I felt physically sick then, too. Especially since a lot of us were convinced that he really wanted to get into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
And look, I’m not going to claim that the Reagan administration wasn’t a disaster for an awful lot of people. By slashing taxes on the rich, he started us down the road towards our huge problem of inequality. And he was directly responsible for the torture and murder of an awfully large number of people in Central and South America. And he let so many gay men die because he refused to acknowledge the horrible disease sweeping the country.
But there was some good stuff, too. He finally decided nuclear war would be a bad thing and made serious moves to prevent it. And we muddled through, and he went away, and someone different came in.
There’s going to be a lot of horrible stuff under Trump. And it’s going to be infuriating, because many of the worst people in the country are going to get rich and powerful, and there will never be any kind of reckoning for them.
But we’ll still be here when he’s gone.*
*And by we, I mean most people. If it gets bad, I’ll be living in Groningen…
It’s a big boat so it will hard to turn and Trump has not shown much in the way of leadership skills. It’s a loss but it’s not the end of the world.
Steve
I wonder if we can put together a list of the end result of each presidential term as listed above.
Because the mythical past so many want to return to, is actually New Deal America, plus the handiwork of moderates like Eisenhower and Kennedy. I’d add Johnson, but he fumbled. He had the right notions on civil rights, welfare, and fighting poverty*. But he pretty much went a quarter to half steam, at best, once he embroiled himself in Vietnam.
I really should read up on the Kennedy-LBJ era…
*Hint: you don’t do it by fighting the poor.
Trump has already given an indication of the nature of his second presidency by inviting the world’s richest man to sit in on an extraordinarily sensitive conversation with Zelenskyy. God knows who Musk will happily describe the discussion to.
Trump will enter the White House for the second time convinced he is the greatest American in history, that he can literally do whatever he likes because he is politically untouchable and immune from any legal peril, and that the leaders of most of America’s allies are gormless pygmies compared to him (Netanyahu always excepted). He will not recognise any distinction between the public and private spheres; the US government will be co-opted as and when necessary to help the fortunes of his various businesses. Any public servant who fails to follow unlawful or improper orders will be summarily dismissed.
The only consolation is that he has proved again and again to be a thoroughly incompetent chief executive who has no idea how to convert orders into results. But the damage he will do to America’s global standing will be immense, and permanent.
James, this is the first election we’ve seen where a President who tried to overthrow the US government was granted near-dictatorial powers by SCOTUS and returned to office with more support from Congress than I’ve ever seen, and promising to enact vengeance on his political opponents.
@Jay L Gischer:
I live in Iowa, but Google ads gave me Texas ads for some reason in the run-up. And Ohio. Not new, Google can’t geo-locate people in Iowa, apparently. Usually I get Minnesota or Illinois ads. Sometimes Wisconsin. I’m used to being mis-geolocated by Google ad services. It’s de riguer standard mispractice/malpractice that I just expect at this point.
They don’t have the decency to serve up local ads from where I actually live.
Texas ads are hard-core. In one Governor Abbott flat out said he was the arbiter of Texan-ness and Colin Allred wasn’t actually a Texan. Another ended with the tag-line: They think this is about they/them and not about you. My jaw dropped. That’s straight up vile. Apparently, Texas Rs are into obvious othering big time. In ads. And people are fine with that. Eye-opening. We don’t get ads like that here.