TEKST

„Do not come.“ – How to lose elections

Donald Trump’s victory should not have been a surprise to anyone paying attention. Yet it seems many politicians, campaign strategists and media talking heads still cannot figure out what went wrong. Their history of failure starts before 2016 and will continue until either the Democratic party leadership begins to understand, or those who do understand take leadership.

I could not get myself to care about the 2024 US Presidential election. The prospect of a second Trump term fills me with existential dread, but I realized my fears are different from those of enthusiastic Kamala Harris supporters. After three “most important elections of our lifetime” in a row, I cannot bring myself to keep up with their panic and outrage. Instead, I wonder what the long-term plan might look like: what comes after Trump? History only moves in one direction, so for better or worse, the future of American democracy is post-Trumpian. Any nostalgia for the Obama era has to reckon with the fact that it created the conditions that allowed for a president like Donald Trump. What else could follow its pale demented echo? Democrats do not think like that. The party does not care what happens past the next election, so why should its voters? “We cannot let Trump become president! We must get Trump out of office! We cannot let him do it again! Nothing else could possibly matter more.” So, I was not surprised when millions of voters stopped showing up for the Democrats. The disregard for the people they were supposedly fighting for meant it was only a matter of time before the fragile coalition of disgruntled Trump-haters would erode. Even if Trump lost, there was nothing to be won.

 I could not make myself care and yet I feel angry. Angry at the Harris campaign, angry at the news media, angry at myself for letting them fool me. All it took was 48 hours of American news coverage and I started doubting all I thought I knew. This poll says Kamala will overperform in Indiana! Here is a graph explaining why the economy is actually doing great! Look at all these college students waiting in line to vote! Everyday another omen and they all spelled Trump’s defeat. Could I not be wrong? My hopes that the conditions that gave us Brexit, Trump and the AfD might also be fruitful ground for a populist left had been dampened over the years. In the US, Bernie Sanders came and went, unable to take over the party like Trump had his. The nascent mass movement was to make room for someone more “electable”. None of it ended up mattering as 81 million Americans came together in the middle of a pandemic to end their national nightmare. The Democratic Party, after warding off the threat of becoming too popular, narrowly beat Donald Trump in the suburbs like they had hoped to do four years earlier. Maybe it was the shock of a global health crisis. Maybe voters got tired of seeing Trump’s disgusting face on TV. Maybe his time in office had disenchanted those who decided in 2016 they would rather roll the dice on a celebrity than elect another machine politician. Whatever the reason, in 2020 Democrats had called the left’s bluff and won; nobody was going to risk a second Trump term. So, sure, Harris’ campaign did not appeal to me, but it was still a billion-dollar operation run by professionals. Am I not just as likely to mistake my little bubble of frustrated radicals for the general sentiment? Am I simply projecting my own disappointments onto the world?

The answer was, of course, no. The former president got the same approximate number of votes that he did the previous two times, and it was enough to defeat his uninspiring opponent once again. This outcome should surprise nobody, except the campaign strategists who still had not managed to beat Trump (except for when he was mishandling the worst health crisis in modern history). But election coverage in the US is hyper-focused on swing states, persuadable independents and the mythical “undecided voter”; party loyalists will vote for their candidate, non-voters will stay home, so elections are won in the margins. This assumption is what vindicates both the Democrats’ obsession with bipartisan unity and moderation, as well as the idea of Trump as an electoral titan enthralling voters with outrageous lies. Donald Trump is such a brazen liar that it is easy to forget politicians had a reputation for it long before he ever came along. What is different post-2016 is the feeling that our political opponents are living in alternate realities. Every election is now an unpredictable moment of truth, revealing who had really been living in the dreaded echo-chamber. Political discourse – untethered from all common truth – is a contest of narratives about the world and each vote against Trump is an assertion of the “liberal values” he attacks. Those who could not stomach Biden’s unshakeable support for Israel or Harris’ adoption of the border wall had “failed” as voters. The self-appointed protectors of democracy are owed not just votes, but vocal support – even as they scoff at the very idea of offering anything in return. If they did not shift to the right, moderates would not vote for them, yet everyone else’s vote is to be unconditional. 

Since the election I have heard the same points repeated by every manner of expert in media and academia, professors and students, and every other “serious” commentator. I heard how different demographics had voted, about Senate races, about the economy doing really well, about Harris not emphasizing enough how dangerous her opponent was. What I did not hear was an explanation for how Democrats had managed to lose 15 million votes in four years. Why had the conservative voters Harris sought to appease voted for Trump at even higher rates, and why were people still arguing about how to win them over next time? Why had popular left-wing issues like universal healthcare disappeared off the stage alongside Bernie Sanders? Who decided that the ghoulish Dick Cheney should take his place? Why did half the voters, who considered the future of democracy their biggest issue, still vote for Trump over Harris? Why did you not see this coming? Again?

The answer is so obvious, you would have to be a political scientist to miss it: people do not like the Democrats. That is becomes an issue when your electoral strategy hinges on those very same people disliking your opponent. But it was not long ago that the Democratic party was home to a coalition formed around the promise of lasting change – not a donation-extortion racket for the temporary protection of ever-precarious rights. A hopeful newcomer had unexpectedly won the primary against one of his party’s biggest names and swept the nation, leading many to wonder if demographic trends meant Republicans would never win another election. Barack Obama wasted no time disappointing his voters on every issue from Wall Street to Flint, Michigan and of course the Middle East. While he lent his charismatic presence to the exact politics he was supposed to overcome, his party learned all the wrong lessons from his 2008 victory. Millions of voters were up for the taking, still reeling from the financial crisis and distrustful of the political establishment. But instead of rebuilding that coalition around common material interests, Democrats relied on them showing up based on identity, if their opponent was distasteful enough; you could either have the first female president or the rape monster. If a young black senator from Chicago could do it, why not the dynastic career politician their base had rejected once before already?

Liberal fantasies of an election stolen by foreign powers have been overshadowed by the spectacle of Trump’s own election denial, but were a clear sign of a party unwilling to own up to their mistakes. Four years later they doubled down on an already senile Joe Biden, offering voters a chance to pretend the Obama era had yet to end. But Biden had always been the old white moderate meant to balance the ticket in 2008, not the inheritor of Obama’s coalition. That momentum was now behind another underdog, Bernie Sanders, and his economic populism. When forced to choose between the two – the Obama era and the Obama coalition – between a candidate appealing to the sensibilities of a post-materialist middle-class and one promising material change, the party threw its weight behind Joe. In an election that could have been won by anyone with a pulse, the party pushed that idea to its limits, hoping to vindicate their 2016 playbook. Perhaps voters had simply not liked Hillary, but now they had experienced what happens when you stop listening to experts and learned their lesson. Democrats warded off the populist attempt to reshape the party and established themselves as competent defenders of the status quo. Their refusal to drop candidates and strategies long after they prove liabilities is a mistake as much as a necessity; any material interest shared by a broad enough coalition runs counter to the interests of large donors. Instead, it’s their voters they throw under the bus when deemed necessary. You do not want Trump to win, right?

It was Republicans who learned the correct lessons, after eight years of their bloodthirsty dynastic rule had given way to a historic defeat in 2008. While a strange choice in 2012, Mitt Romney’s awkward combination of two American idiosyncrasies – Mormonism and big money hustling – indicated a party in need of a renaissance. As the electorate grew less white, less traditional and a lot less wealthy, Romney was captain and figurehead of a sinking ship: not just vaguely Christian but a proper Mormon, not just a business-friendly politician but a businessman running for CEO of the country. One of these attributes, however, would later prove a winning ingredient. Christian values have never been more than a fig leaf, theatre for the benefit of voters. But its function is not to fool them, but to provide an acceptable cover story for bashful reactionaries. By 2016 the leadership had yet to recognize this act had long outlived its usefulness. One last time they sent a Bush along with the others to humiliating defeats on the debate stage, proving that even a billionaire could pass as an outsider by showing real disregard for the theatre and fake-decency of party politics. As ridiculous as it sounds, to a white (lower-)middle-class voter, Trump can be an Obama-like figure. He acts as a representative for the politically paranoid who feel threatened by the people-power of the marginalized and the capital interests of foreign and domestic elites alike. As long as neither party makes a convincing economic pitch to the growing number of downwardly mobile voters, Democrats will lose for the same reason that it is more exciting to storm the Capitol than to read the Mueller report.

So far neither base has warmed to the attempts of professionalizing Trump’s policy, separating it from the vulgar spectacle. But what else is the possible endpoint of asking voters to accept the lesser evil, only to have the greater evil become “smart moderate policy” four years later? No matter how many times their strategy fails, Democrats will gladly keep losing as long as it is more profitable than winning with the left. This downwards spiral is as real a threat to democracy as Trump, and will not end with him. There exists a strain of “moderates”, not just in the USA, who feel entitled to power, who believe in nothing and will accept anything if they think it wins elections. Their allegiance to democracy is a commitment to procedures, not people. They will claim they lost because the country is simply too racist or sexist, priming us to accept any conservative white man they force on voters for his supposed “electability”. If we refuse, we are a liability: why waste resources on non-voters? For these people a “competent Trump” is no longer a threat, but a promising running mate for Henry Kissinger’s cadaver in 2028. They will ask you to compromise more and more, give up on solidarity, because there can be no red line when fighting the greater evil. It is already happening, wherever Liberalism is in decline and sustaining itself on the threat of worse to come. It is important we stop listening to them. 

Enno Jasper


Tekst je financiran sredstvima Fonda za poticanje pluralizma i raznovrsnosti elektroničkih medija Agencije za elektroničke medije za 2024. godinu.