In the dark despondency of yesterday morning’s news, and all but tremoring with symptoms of acute Trump Derangement, I emailed a friend at 5 a.m. “For the second time in eight years,” I wrote, “the American people have chosen as their tribune an ignorant, malicious, thuggish, xenophobic, woman-hating, ethically impaired, clinically narcissistic, grifting jackass. Father, forgive us. We know not what we do.”
An hour later I tuned in to the funeral gathering on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and listened as former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill commented in a similar vein. Asserting bitterly that Trump “knows our country better than we do,” McCaskill credited him with figuring out “that anger and fear were way more powerful than appealing to people’s better angels.” From the day Trump descended the golden staircase at Trump Tower in 2015, McCaskill said, right up to the joy-based candidacy of Kamala Harris, Democrats have been hoping that those better angels would eventually reject him. “Turns out, the better angels went on vacation,” she noted mordantly. “And they haven’t returned.”
However gratifying it is to believe you’re on the side of the angels, it doesn’t really help you understand what went wrong. Commenting after McCaskill, Joe Scarborough sharply challenged her analysis. “It’s time for Democrats to take a long hard look at what happened and at themselves,” he said. “And if they just keep saying, ‘Trump bad, Democrats virtuous,’ they are going to continue to lose. This is not about just Donald Trump. This is about the Democratic Party.” Scarborough pointed to the electoral map with its two coastal outposts of blue framing the vastness of red America. The Democratic party ensconced in those outposts, he commented, is “radically disconnected from the rest of the country.”
In the days to come, those seeking to explain Trump’s victory will have any number of arguments to reach for. Harris and the Democrats were put in a difficult situation by the belated recusal of Biden: she had to play catch-up, and the party was deprived of the normal process for choosing the strongest candidate. Trump’s macho bluster energized the bro and male Hispanic vote. Americans may not be willing to elect a Black woman as President. And on and on. Then there’s the fact that much of the world is caught up in a wave of nationalist populism. Why should we be an exception?
Yet when all that is factored in, I return to the central, unignorable reality contained in Scarborough’s comment and in that national map. The wealthy, worldly, and highly educated parts of this nation are Democratic, while the struggling, provincial, and undereducated parts are Republican—and there are not enough of the former places and too many of the latter. Forty years of technological and commercial revolution, abetted by economic policies put forth by both parties, have produced an upper 20 percent of this country that’s doing extremely well, while everyone else struggles. That upper 20 percent is heavily concentrated in blue states like the one I live in (Connecticut). This has to change. The Democratic Party has to find a way not to be the party of bicoastal elites.
Being a part of that liberal elite has meant responding to the phenomenon of Trump with the kind of indignant disbelief that I evinced in that email. Yet beneath the lurid demagoguery of Trump’s campaign diatribes are some legitimate concerns and anxieties; each poisonous flower contains a seed of truth. Mass immigration is not merely an excuse for hateful xenophobia; it is also a global phenomenon that is causing systemic structural political and social dislocations. The state of our economy isn’t merely Trump spewing dire warnings about “American carnage” and heralding himself as savior; it is also the grinding daily worry of people whose future feels grim to them. Just yesterday, an acquaintance of mine—an extraordinarily hard-working small-business owner—confessed to fearing that her twenty-six-year-old son will never be able to buy a house. “I just don’t see it happening,” she said. Meanwhile, the other night a good friend of mine—a successful professional with apartments in two different cities—was updating me on her twenty-six-year-old son, who is trying to make a career in the arts in New York City. Like numerous twentysomething children of friends of mine, he’s relying on parental rent subsidies to help him do this; and when it comes time for him and his wife (he married recently) to buy a house, family resources will doubtless make that happen, too. That kind of intergenerational wealth, and its ability to cushion hardship, is a fact of life among liberal Democrats in the upper 20 percent. Is it any surprise that my small-business-owning friend, who doesn’t have that cushion to offer her son, says, “I’m a Democrat on paper, but…” and then just shakes her head?
Meanwhile, the liberal-progressive left focuses on systemic racism, attitudinal privilege, LBGTQ+ rights, defunding the police, condemning settler colonialism abroad, and vetting offensive speech and ideas. This focus is not just a phenomenon of elite college campuses, with their bloated diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies. The DEI-fication of America has reached deep into corporate and educational institutions. A dear friend of mine —a lifelong liberal Democrat who in this election abandoned the party —chafes at the many “trainings” she has experienced at work over the past decade or so. Those trainings, she reports, consist of employees sitting in listless silence as they’re lectured about attitudinal adjustments they need to make. In my friend’s view, these trainings are worse than useless. “When normies are told, in a DEI training, that insisting on being on time for work reflects white supremacy—well, eventually those normies will leave the political party that’s pushing that kind of training.” And it isn’t just the trainings that are a problem. Normies don’t believe that the economy is OK when their kids will never be able to afford a house. Normies don’t hate Latinos, but they recognize that we have a huge problem with uncontrolled immigration at our southern border, and they don’t like being made to feel racist for recognizing it. Normies believe that trans people deserve individual dignity, but they may also believe that there are males and females, that the reality of biology can’t simply be dispensed with (or altered), and that trans women should not be allowed to compete in sports against biological females. These normies will only take so much scolding and correction before they decide to bolt from a Democratic party that they believe has lost touch with reality. Anyone who doubts this is happening should check the results of last night’s vote in, say, the suburbs of New Jersey.
I believe that the DEI orientation is not just a distraction, but—as Scarborough said—a disconnection. In my opinion, Democrats need to ditch it and get back to the traditional Democratic business of fighting for the poor, the working class, and the middle class; they need to shift the focus from identity to the hard realities of economics and wealth. Kamala’s shortcomings as a candidate were not primarily personal; the reality is that she didn’t really stand for anything except mushy bromides of unity, social justice, and inclusion, and, of course, an understandable aversion to Trump. The misplaced focus on “joy,” and her calculated decision to present laughter and good humor as the literal face of her candidacy—a temperamental counterpoint to her glowering opponent—may have backfired and contributed to that mushiness and that disconnection. The next Democratic presidential candidate needs simplicity, clarity, and forcefulness, even a vehement forcefulness. It’s important for Democrats to understand that Trumpian anger is not the only kind; there is also the kind of righteous anger born of conviction.
On a related note, I believe that Democrats need to take a page from Trump’s playbook and rethink how their candidates run political rallies, and specifically their approach to oratory. Any leader making a populist appeal has to form an unusually intense connection to his followers. Trump has been a virtuoso of this intensity. One way he does it is by refusing to present a rehearsed self to his public and opting instead for rambling extemporaneity. The result has been an impression of authenticity, and an electric connection to his followers, that has completely upset the conventional political campaign.
I listened to some of Trump’s speech at Madison Square Garden two weeks ago. At one point during a series of rampant digressions, Trump paused to praise his own rhetorical style. “Isn’t it nice to hear someone who doesn’t need a teleprompter?” he mused. “Isn’t it really absolutely completely beautiful?” And the crowd roared.
The very first time I wrote about Trump for Commonweal—more than nine years ago!—I singled out this aspect of his campaigning. Wondering aloud how he got away with remarks that would sink another candidate, I suggested that we had drastically underestimated the power of his willingness to speak candidly, to say things he was not “supposed” to say. People were tired, I wrote back then, of listening to stage-managed politicians who we suspected would sound completely different if we ever heard them in an unguarded moment. With Trump, every moment is unguarded. His slurs and insinuations and off-color gibes convey the impression that he’s not hiding anything; that he’s giving us the truth, however crude and inflammatory. Of course there’s a false inference here: just because people feel lied to by glib and polished politicians doesn’t mean that the opposite of polished talk is political honesty; it can also be hucksterism and narcissism, as it is in Trump’s case. Yet the impression of authenticity remains alluring. I recall a caller on NPR’s On Point telling host Tom Ashbrook, concerning candidate Trump in 2015, “He’s the only one who isn’t a robot!”
As a speechifier, Trump is a throwback to the stump style of a century ago and more, a twenty-first-century William Jennings Bryan. His spontaneity brings to mind Mark Twain’s famed quip that “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” It may seem perverse to mention that line in connection to a habitual liar. But Trump’s habit of speaking his mind without any kind of filter is worth paying attention to. It’s not a superficial thing. In order to speak your mind, you have to have something on your mind—whether it’s a clear worldview and a political lodestar, or simply a single-minded fixation on your own gloriousness. In a weird way, Trump’s unedited, extemporaneous speaking style is a degraded version of the rhetorical freedom that comes with actual conviction—a freedom to get up there and simply speak your mind that a conventional candidate like Kamala Harris lacks. Democrats need a conviction candidate.
As the shape of the catastrophe began to emerge last night, the mood at Harris’s campaign party at Howard University sank. “As returns came in,” NBC’s Peter Alexander reported this morning, “they ultimately muted the screen and turned music on, to try to cheer up the crowd.” Democrats now face four years of gnashing their teeth under a second Trump Administration. Let’s hope party leaders and thinkers use this time to find a way out of the wilderness. What will really cheer up the crowd next time will be rebalancing the party’s priorities, reconnecting to its traditional politics—including the real-world values of the normies—and then finding a candidate who can ditch the teleprompter, get up there and just talk.
If Democrats aren’t able to do that, we might as well just keep the screen muted and the music turned up loud.
