Tag Archives: 2024 election

The Biggest Problem We Face

In a recent conversation, my youngest son made an observation that went to the very heart of America’s current political dysfunction: it’s the media–but not in the way that accusation usually assumes. Whatever the considerable deficits of “mainstream” coverage–and there were plenty of them–focusing on the New York Times and Washington Post and their ilk ignores the fact that the vast majority of Trump voters never read them. 

As my son pointed out, what almost all of the finger-pointing and attacks on “messaging” miss is that Harris’s messaging was fine (indeed, it was arguably better than Democratic messaging in prior election cycles). That messaging would have made a huge difference–had it reached a majority of voters.  

It didn’t.

We live in a time when mainstream media reaches far fewer people than the right wing media ecosystem that has developed in our digital age. That ecosystem goes far beyond Fox and Sinclair–it includes sites like AONN, social media like X/twitter, and all of the rightwing troll farms, bloggers, and podcasters.  Their effectiveness rests on a dimly-understood reality: not only do these sources collectively reach more people, unlike mainstream outlets they are all on the same page--they reinforce and repeat the same propaganda, ignore the same “inconvenient” facts, and do so over sustained periods of time. Not only do they distort reality and manufacture issues (immigrants are eating dogs and cats), they encourage their audiences to blame groups against whom they’re already prejudiced. 

The center/left has absolutely nothing like this, and would be philosophically allergic to establishing a similar propaganda arm.  

There is evidence that Harris’s message would have been persuasive had it been able to penetrate that rightwing echo chamber. When the candidates’ names were removed, and only their policy proposals were polled, Harris’s plans and statements were vastly more popular than Trump’s.  But Harris’ messaging never reached a majority of Trump voters.  

It is certainly the case that significant numbers of voters simply refused to hear her, thanks to the rampant sexism and racism that characterized much of the voting public, but we cannot dismiss the importance of the fact that a majority of the American voting public never sees mainstream coverage. (People struggling to put food on the table don’t subscribe to the New York Times.) The deciding plurality of voters who delivered the election to Trump received only the Trump cult’s  messaging. 

If that observation is true–and there’s ample research to confirm its accuracy–Democrats need to stop their carping about what the campaign did or didn’t do right, and address the (pun intended) elephant in the room. How can fact-based information be delivered to people who have opted to get all of their information from a massive, co-ordinated right-wing propaganda ecosystem?

I tend to agree with my son, who argues that the actual messaging mistake wasn’t content or tone. It was dissemination.

Democrats have made a very consequential error in refusing to engage with the propaganda on the propagandists’ turf. Only Pete Buttigeig and Gavin Newsom have been willing to take Democratic perspectives onto that turf–to bring contending facts and messages to the millions of people who get their “facts” from media sources voicing the preferred messages of what Hillary Clinton once–quite accurately– called “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Autocrats everywhere understand the power of media, and move to control it. In the United States, a shadowy network of rightwing think tanks, theocratic organizations and plutocrats have been working for decades to roll back the “woke” politics of inclusion and civic equality–to return us to a social order dominated by straight White Christian males. Participants in that network understood that control of information was key to the success of that effort, and the right-wing media ecosystem is the result.

I often remind readers that support for the Constitution and the Rule of Law requires an informed public. When a significant portion of the public is misinformed, when they are fed uncontested propaganda that feeds and plays to their already-potent fears and prejudices, we get outcomes like the one we got on November 5th. 

How to penetrate that ecosystem is a conundrum. Making it even more challenging is the vocabulary of the Right. I’ll discuss that further obstacle to political sanity tomorrow.

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The Best Analysis I’ve Seen

As I said yesterday, political finger-pointing is utterly beside the point. Harris ran a masterful campaign–unfortunately, she was female and Black, running against a man who encouraged people to vote their misogyny and bigotries.

As I also said yesterday, the election results weren’t political–they were cultural.

The best analysis I’ve seen was from Talking Points Memo.

That analysis began with what we all saw: this was a campaign “fought directly over the issues of democracy, rule of law, basic decency and respect, and protection for the marginalized.” Those were the principles and values that lost–soundly. As David Kurtz wrote, this wasn’t another fluke of our crazy Electoral College.

The dark path ahead was chosen clearly and unequivocally: With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote. Second, Trump will win without undue reliance on the quirks of our 18th century anti-majoritarian constitutional structure.

There is clarity in that result. This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.

Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.

If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.

There’s a lesson here: don’t expect politics to fix a cultural problem. Kurtz isn’t counseling us to ignore politics–although he also reminds us that we are at risk of losing the mechanisms for achieving political results – the threats to free and fair elections, majority rule, and the rule of law itself will make politics much harder. What he is doing is reminding us that what needs to change is the culture.

For those of us who believe in the rule of law, a pluralistic society, and standing up to unkind people who engage in hurting others as public blood sport, we’re going to have to take a long view toward promoting those principles in all aspects of our culture so that they are ultimately reflected in our politics in a way they simply are not now. I recognize that many of us have already been doing this slow and steady work, which makes the overnight result even more discouraging. It remains an enormous, decades-long task, but it is something each of us can engage in without uprooting our lives or changing professions or moving abroad.

With respect to the political tasks we face, he reminds us that marginalized and the disenfranchised folks are always hurt first and that it will be worse this time because hurting them has been advertised as the point.

The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us. The past decade has felt like a detour from the lives and aspirations we had hoped to have. I feel a special empathy for those who came of age in the 1960s at the peak of Great Society reforms and have spent their adults lives witnessing their erosion. Those of us with an act or two left, and especially those with their whole lives still to dedicate to making America better than she is presenting right now, owe it to those whose time is ending to summon our essential optimism, roll up our sleeves, and get to down to the hard work that our current predicament demands. That may sound like a rallying cry, but I’m also trying to convince myself.

The first step to finding  a solution to any problem is to define it accurately. Blaming campaign errors or systemic electoral issues just keeps us from recognizing the (very ugly) truth: a majority of American voters are unhappy with social changes that confer civic equality on people they consider inferior. They are unable to recognize the multiple ways those social changes actually benefit them, and they want to “return” to a time that existed only in their imaginations.

Good people have work to do.

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Who We Are

Four days before election day, Dana Milbank wrote a column that said it all. 

His point was simple: unlike the election in 2016, no sentient American could fail to be aware of who and what Donald Trump is. As he said, in four days, we will look in the mirror and see who we are.

Have we become so coarse that we would choose as our head of state a man whose climactic campaign rally at Madison Square Garden was a grotesque collection of four-letter words, vulgar sexual references and explicitly racist attacks against Black people, Latinos, Jews and Palestinians?

Have we become so disoriented by disinformation that, even though the economy is booming, inflation and illegal border crossings are sharply down, and crime is below where it was when Trump left office, we accept as reality Trump’s preposterous inventions about America being “destroyed” and an “occupied country” under the control of immigrant criminals?

Have we lost so much of our democratic muscle memory and civic culture over 10 years that we no longer flinch at a presidential candidate who talks of suspending the Constitution and imprisoning political opponents?

Have we become so numb to brutality that we no longer notice his support for vigilante violence and for using the military to attack Americans?

And are we willing to risk everything on a man who has clearly become more erratic and dangerous with age?

That was the question on our ballots yesterday.

Milbank followed that question with a litany intended to remind readers of Trump’s actual threats and “promises”–to go after his personal enemies, to remake the Justice Department into an instrument of his personal vengeance, to jail his opponents, to free the “patriots” that have been convicted of insurrection…the list went on. He reminded readers of the neo-Nazi rhetoric: migrants are “poisoning the blood” of good White Christian Americans, immigrants are “animals.”

Milbank noted the unprecedented number of Republicans–not just from prior administrations, but from Trump’s own–who warned that he is a fascist who should never be allowed to exercise power. And he compared the candidates’ closing messages.

The warm-up acts for Harris included a woman who nearly died because she couldn’t get an abortion despite severe complications; a daughter of refugees; a woman who gets health care for her son through the Affordable Care Act; Republican farmers from Pennsylvania; and the brother of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died from strokes the day after defending the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I’ve had enough of Trump’s politics of chaos, anger and hate. It has real and dangerous consequences for all of us,” Craig Sicknick said.

The warm-up acts for Trump? Tony Hinchcliffe, a supposed comedian, called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” and said: “These Latinos, they love making babies. … There’s no pulling out; they don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” He mocked a Black man’s do-rag in the audience (“What the hell is that, a lampshade?”) and spoke of Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins. He remarked: “Rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians are going to throw rock every time. But you also know the Jews have a hard time throwing that paper,” referring to money.

Another speaker raised his middle finger to Democrats and called Trump “the greatest f—ing president.” Others called Harris “the Antichrist” who, with her “pimp handlers,” will destroy our country, and labeled Doug Emhoff “a crappy Jew,” Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a bitch” and Democrats “a bunch of degenerates.”

Bottom line: the choice between Trump and Harris amounts to a choice of who we are. The election result will tell us how many Americans cling to the aspirations of our constituent documents– and how many angry, resentful people cast votes for hate and division.

Yesterday’s election really boiled down to one question: are we better than this?

When I went to bed last night, I didn’t know the answer to that question–but one fact had become undeniable. Realizing that so many people cast votes for this truly despicable man–a man who threatens every American value, not to mention global stability– has plunged me into a very dark place. There’s no denying the bleak truth: millions of my fellow Americans rejected civility, logic, and simple humanity…..

I guess I know who we are…..and it isn’t pretty.

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Scary Psuedo-Christians

I would hide under my bed, but it’s a platform bed. There isn’t enough room.

As America barrels toward November 5th (or, as I’ve come to call it, Judgement Day), I encounter vastly more reporting on the people who form the MAGA base, a Christian Nationalist cohort that I just don’t encounter in my daily life. Without those reports, I would probably agree with my husband, who insists that there simply can’t be that many voters who aren’t repelled by Trump and his weird, disjointed fascist rhetoric.

I really, really want to believe that. I want confirmation of my lifelong belief in the good will and good sense of the  American public. But then I come across articles like a recent one in The Atlantic.

In the final moments of the last day, some 2,000 people were on their feet, arms raised and cheering under a big white tent in the grass outside a church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. By then they’d been told that God had chosen them to save America from Kamala Harris and a demonic government trying to “silence the Church.” They’d been told they had “authority” to establish God’s Kingdom, and reminded of their reward in heaven. Now they listened as an evangelist named Mario Murillo told them exactly what was expected of Christians like them.

“We are going to prepare for war,” he shouted, and a few minutes later: “I’m not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.”

The event had been cast as an old-fashioned tent revival, but it was entirely political–amplifying (as if we needed amplification) the reality that fundamentalist Christianity has morphed into a political, rather than religious, identity.  This particular effort targeted “souls” in swing states.

It was an unapologetic exercise in religious radicalization happening in plain sight, just off a highway and down the street from a Panera. The point was to transform a like-minded crowd of Donald Trump–supporting believers into “God-appointed warriors” ready to do whatever the Almighty might require of them in November and beyond.

So far, thousands of people have attended the traveling event billed as the “Courage Tour,” including the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, who was a special guest this past weekend in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. The series is part of a steady drumbeat of violent rhetoric, prayer rallies, and marches coming out of the rising Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose ultimate goal is not just Trump’s reelection but Christian dominion—a Kingdom of God. When Trump speaks of “my beautiful Christians,” he usually means these Christians and their leaders—networks of apostles and prophets with hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a day preceded by events such as those happening now.

This particular series of events was organized by an influential “prophet” named Lance Wallnau, best known for having urged his followers to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6, and who described that day’s efforts to overturn the election as part of a new “Great Awakening.”

The article describes what happens when the organizers get people under the tent. Attendees will be met with intense pressure to move them “from passivity to action” and to enlist them into “God’s army.” According to the article, there are loudspeakers,  drums, lights and “a huge video screen roughly 20 feet wide and eight feet high.”

It is a deliberate process, one choreographed to the last line, and in Eau Claire, on the grass outside Oasis Church, the four days began with a kind of promise.

“The first thing I’m going to say is you did not come to see me,” Murillo said. “You came to see Jesus Christ.”

Because Jesus–according to these pastors–wants them to go to the polls and elect Donald Trump.

There’s much more in the article, if you have the stomach to read it in its entirety. The “Christians” portrayed have nothing in common with the Christians I know, or the churches with which I am familiar. It’s hard for me to believe that thousands–millions–of people do subscribe to this massive distortion of a faith tradition, but then I recall that some seventy million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and another eighty million didn’t bother to vote at all.

Most of those non-voters probably weren’t Christian Nationalists , but they also weren’t sufficiently concerned about the possibility of a Trump victory to cast a ballot. How many of the apathetic will vote this year–and for whom?

If I lose some weight, maybe I can crawl under that platform bed.

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Question And Answer

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?

How can this election possibly be close?

Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance  “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”

Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)

And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.

Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.

When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.

Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.

This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.

His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.

This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.

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