Who Is To Be Blamed

And: What Is To Be Expected

Dear Friends,

I had the real treat of being part of

Eleanor Anstruther

’s interview series ‘8 Questions’ in which we talk about Substack and writing in general. I’ll cross-post here as soon as my nausea over the election subsides….should be about 48 hours.

Best,

Sam

WHO IS TO BE BLAMED

1.Joe Biden. Biden literally had one job to do, which was, once he was elected, to prepare to step aside. In 2020, he portrayed himself as a transitional president. And then he realized that he liked being president and got greedy. Right after the 2022 midterms — which the Democrats lost — was the moment to make his move. But not only did Biden choose to see the party’s relatively strong performance as a vote of confidence in himself, he aggressively shouldered any potential rivals out of the primary. Party leaders with spine would have run anyway, but that commodity was in short supply on the Democratic side. By not stepping aside until he had no other choice, Biden set this trainwreck in motion. As Barack Obama apparently actually did say once, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

2.The liberal establishment — and particularly the liberal media. The pillars of the establishment, one by one, came to see themselves as having their primary adherence to a progressive vision — to being on the right side of history — at the expense of institutional norms. This happened with academics in a slow burn starting roughly in the ‘70s, with the rise of MSNBC and a self-proclaimed progressive media as an overreaction to FOX in the ‘00s, most critically with the progressive turn of legacy print publications in the first Trump term, and then with the sort of administrative institutional structure as a whole in the 2020s. The idea was to persuade the unwashed masses through effective framing, but in the end nobody was really persuaded and the institutions destroyed their credibility, maybe permanently. This strategy of willful distortion likely reached its apogee with the whitewashing of Biden’s age — with outlets, whose job it is to serve as watchdogs to power, simply going along with narratives that Biden was as “sharp as a tack” or that it was no big deal (it was ageist to ask the question, really) for the president of the United States to confuse the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt. (Remember the grief that the very same people gave to George W. Bush for mispronouncing ‘nuclear’?)

3.Joe Biden again. His first tweet stepping down was an elegant, professionally-phrased tweet — a dignified exit of the elderly statesman from the public stage. But, once again, you can never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up — and his second tweet brought the house down once again. There really was time, as late as July to have a brokered convention and a quasi-primary. Instead, we had the coronation of an unpopular vice president who had never won a primary vote — who was largely unknown to the public, lacked the skill to properly introduce herself, and, given the means of her ascent, was a bit laughable as the force ‘protecting democracy’ from the Trumpy threat.

4.Kamala Harris. I don’t particularly blame Harris for losing the election. She was dealt a tough hand — she had only a few months to acclimate herself to a presidential race; and she was saddled essentially with Biden’s team. She did ok under the circumstances, but she just didn’t have it and the campaign made a few costly tactical blunders. The most egregious — again — was the failure to make use of new media. By throwing away the chance to appear on Rogan, Harris forfeited her last real opportunity to make inroads with swing voters at any kind of scale. The really serious shortcomings of the campaign were an inability to settle on a strong message to win independents; a failure to decide whether Harris was running as an incumbent or a challenger; and then a pervasive sense of caution, running as if Harris were the frontrunner although she never was.

5.Jerry Rubin. The Democratic Party has spent the last 50 years losing its coherence. It was the party of unions and it was the party of propping up the New Deal, and none of that exists anymore. A recent paper pins the Democrats’ wrong turn on a new economic policy initiated circa 1976 in which the Dems switched from being a party of “predistribution” to a party of “redistribution.” “Compensate the losers” is the term the paper’s authors use for the new approach. It made sense as a way of trying to combine neoliberalism with the Dems’ bleeding heart instincts, but in the long term it was a loser. The Dems became the party of taxes, which was strike one, and of regulation, which was strike two. Whenever the Dems came to be associated with social upheaval — or presented as the party of radicals — that was strike three for their electoral chances. Probably the decisive turn in the Democrats’ fortune on that front was the 1968 Chicago convention and the association of the Dems with radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and their chant “We are dirty, smelly, grimy, and foul…we will piss and shit and fuck in public.” That disorder may well have cost the Democrats the 1968 election — and broke a highly-successful electoral coalition — and the Democrats never really overcame that negative association. To a great many voters, what mattered in this election was a) abolish the police; b) the general collapse of civic order in urban centers, particularly liberal coastal enclaves (i.e. the ‘new normal’ where all drugstore goods are now under lock and key….and with the attendant nowhere in sight); c) the Democrats’ unwillingness to acknowledge any kind of fraying of the social order as a problem. As an issue, immigration is really an extension of this general perception of the Democrats as being unkempt. Not only can they not maintain order in their cities, goes the thinking, but they bring that chaos to national borders as well. This is why, as dismayed as I am with some of Kamala Harris’ tactical decisions, I can’t be that mad at her. She didn’t inherit a very good hand, and the Democrats are going to continue to be the losing party until they manage to rebrand the party.

Dirty, smelly, grimy, and foul….Jerry Rubin

6.Hillary Clinton. At an ideological level, the Democrats put themselves into a difficult position. In every election, they were the ones who had to defend taxes and justify government — and with their old base gradually fraying. They compensated by developing an image. They became the young, cool, cosmopolitan party. It was Bill Clinton playing the sax. It was Jon Stewart staring with eyes popping at the camera. The coalition that Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama put together was a delicate but viable coalition. The question is what happened to it, and the answer basically is that the Democrats failed to pay attention to the arts of political rhetoric. Their patrician leaders, Al Gore and John Kerry, were a little too high-minded and lost on attack ads. The next round of Democratic leaders over-compensated slightly — they focused on fundraising and on the ad war and missed the extent to which political rhetoric boils down to simple, effective messaging charismatically delivered. The really unfortunate turn was the Hillary Clinton campaign, with Hillary trying to run a reprise of 1992 in her appeal to middle-of-the-road voters but doing so without Bill’s sizzle. The result was an alphabet soup of talking points and poll-tested positions that appealed to no one, and, even worse, the Democrats, aggrieved from their loss, took all the wrong lessons from it. They doubled down on identitarian politics, went even further into a contrived political lingo and into a belief that demographics would shape destiny. But they ended up with the same impenetrable political speech that, in the end, turned off even the groups (blacks and Hispanics) whom they were most sure of securing.

7.The gullibility of Americans. I am completely insistent that this was the Democrats’ race to lose and their defeat is a self-inflicted wound of epic proportions. Trump really was not that good of a candidate. He does the basics in terms of messaging and aggressive campaigning, and he does have a sixth sense for the collective id, but he’s wildly all over the place. Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would have beaten him without trouble. But, nonetheless, we have to admit that the American people have never seemed quite as gullible as they do right now — which is saying something. What has been really mysterious to me with the Trump phenomenon is why, in the national landscape, he has never reached the level that he did for decades in New York City — as an amusing rogue whom no one took seriously. He hasn’t changed from then. He’s only gotten more into his shtick as he’s gotten older, but somehow the wider public manages to see him as a gladiator or even as some kind of holy warrior and just can’t quite see through to what an act it all is. He seemed barely capable, in his victory speech, of keeping a straight face or injecting a note of sincerity, when he declared, “And for every citizen I will fight for you for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body.” But, somehow, it seems not to have entered into the consciousness of the MAGA base that they are being laughed at. As Joseph Smith said once, turning to a visitor just before he addressed his faithful, “These are the greatest dupes, as a body of people, that ever lived, or I am not so big a rogue as I am reported to be.”

WHAT IS TO BE EXPECTED

1.The more I think about Trump, the more I think I understand what he’s getting at in terms of governance. Basically, it’s libertarianism — it’s having no annoying government to collect taxes or enforce regulations. On the other hand, it’s sort of fun to use the office of the presidency — if you happen to be the president — to create a bit of mischief globally and to drone-strike the occasional Iranian. The truth is that what Trump has in mind is a bit in keeping with the founders’ vision — a vibrant market, strong militias and self-reliance, but very limited federal government. At some level, it shouldn’t be that frightening — and what he advocates for taps into a very deep vein of American political theory — but the issue is that the United States has evolved quite a lot since then, and Trump has nowhere near the discipline to enact some kind of libertarian ideal. What we can expect is a nasty war with the administrative state, a general betrayal of the US’ commitments around the world, and, probably, a looting of whatever Trump’s corporate friends want from the state. It has to be kept in mind that Trump doesn’t have to think about reelection. Now he really does have four years to do whatever it is he wants.

The occasional Iranian….Qassem Soleimani

2.The Democrats’ defeat was so total that it can’t be alibied away. (This might not be for want of trying — the CNN panel on election night was already blaming Americans’ ingrained racism for the loss.) And the silver lining here is that Trump won big enough that the Democrats can’t get bogged down in accusations of political violence or election-stealing, etc. Instead, the Democrats have no real alternative except, essentially, to scrap their entire party and start from scratch. My fond hope is that whoever runs in 2028 will be someone I’ve never heard of (unless maybe it’s Buttigieg). More importantly than that, they need to recognize that their entire M.O. isn’t working — the coalition isn’t a winning coalition either on a state-by-state or a demographic level, they have no message, and their identitarian focus has led them into a really ruinous electoral trap. They will have all of Trump’s meshugas to beat up on in the next few years, but we’ve seen the limits of that. My intuition is that a richer target has come into view with Elon Musk’s embrace of Trump. It’s hard to concoct a more perfect villain than the mad South African plutocrat trying to buy votes in Pennsylvania. My overall suggestion would be for the Democrats to identify where Musk is in the political map and to position themselves exactly as the opposite. That probably means taking steps to rein in Big Tech and to enforce antitrust against the kinds of monopolists and oligarchs who are about to get every kind of tax break and favor that they could possibly want from the Trump administration. The current iteration of the Democratic Party isn’t really capable of thinking in these terms because they treat tech as an ATM, but all of that fundraising advantage got them nothing at all in this race and is worth sacrificing for a message. Teddy Roosevelt put together the most successful bipartisan coalition in American history and he did it with a dedicated antitrust platform. Something like that seems well out of the reach of the current Dems, but charismatic politicians can do anything. It took FDR a hundred days to turn his party on its axis and find the winning vision. The Democrats have four bitter years in exile to do the same.