“Giving Up Is Unforgivable”
– by Joyce James
Civil Discourse
I’m not certain it’s possible to understand what happened in the 2024 election this close to it, beyond the undeniable outcome: Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. For two weeks now, people have been trying to assemble the pieces of how we got here, but it’s like the old proverb about blind men feeling different parts of an elephant. Depending on where you’re situated, you might feel a trunk, or a leg, or a patch of hide, but you don’t really get a sense of the whole thing.
Still, it’s hard not to want to try and understand. For one thing, that’s critical for the midterm election, which is painful to think about right now, but could become a very real way of setting limits on the damage Trump can do to democracy by installing a functioning legislative branch to check him—as the Founding Fathers intended. One good reason for trying to diagnose what went wrong is to see if it’s possible to reassemble and strengthen what so many people were convinced was a pro-democracy coalition assembled to defeat Trump. Putting it back together, more successfully, in time to save the country at the midterms, resulting in a Democratic-led House and Senate, would be a significant check and balance on a bloated executive branch.
Cartoonist David Sipress posted this image on Twitter, which perfectly captures the risk of getting this moment wrong like so many people did in early 2017. It’s going to be bad—we know that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
There are lots of attempts to explain the 2024 election. Many voters said something along the lines of, they were unhappy with the government and wanted to try something new. These voters were concerned about the economy (although even The Wall Street Journal conceded it was the strongest in the world), the price of gasoline, and other similar issues that amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump. It was all summed up for me a few days after the election, in a conversation with an acquaintance who said they’d voted for Harris, but at least “my portfolio is doing great this week.”
Voters who ignored the facts about the economy and used them as an excuse to vote for Trump weren’t people who wanted a change. They were people who, actually, didn’t want any change at all. They didn’t like new policies advanced by the Biden-Harris administration, a more inclusive vision of America where traditionally marginalized people had equal opportunity. They didn’t want a new generation of leadership. They wanted the “old stability,” the patriarchy that has run the country for generations. In many ways, that’s what’s at the heart of the conservative coalition. It’s not a rejection of the established order; it’s an embrace of it.
If that’s what Trump voters thought they were getting, they may be sorely disappointed. As I wrote, in a piece about Trump’s coming plans for mass deportation to be published later this week on Cafe.com, the Trump presidency isn’t a pick-your-adventure experience, where you can get some parts of Trump’s plan, but not all of it.
Steve Bannon, hosting his War Room podcast on November 15 said: “Donald Trump and his revolution is in charge now. And that revolution is going to make its way from Mar-a-Lago and from every part of the country, like Andrew Jackson, it’s going to converge on the imperial capitol in late January. And yes, we’re going to burn some of these institutions down to the ground. Because you know why? They need to be burned down to the ground. Metaphorically. As the process of creative destruction. The process of the structure of revolutions, the paradigm shift has impact.”
Trump delegate and New Jersey Republican Mike Crispi tweeted:
“Will RFK get confirmed? Will Gaetz get confirmed? The answer is YES… as long as Johnson and Thune hold true to their word to support the President’s agenda. Recess appointments solves all. It’s time to WIN!”
Recess appointments, to the extent they “solve[s] all,” do so at the expense of the Constitution, as we’ve been discussing this week. Appointing people to run cabinet level agencies who are opposed to the work or the people who do the work won’t help. Trump doesn’t want to do the hard work of governing, and he has expressed little interest in helping the American people—certainly not all of them, and especially not the ones who didn’t vote for him. He has no interest in remaking government, because he doesn’t understand it. Trump wants to protect himself, not the people.
Thinking a vote for Trump was a rejection of “elites” is part of the weak tea biography Trump sold to far too many Americans—the idea that he, the guy who started out on third base, hit and would continue hitting homes runs for them. Trump appeals to people who want to slide into home without having to run all the bases; that’s his ultimate appeal, the cheat who somehow manages to succeed, surrounded by his billionaire friends.
In her concession speech, Kamala Harris reminded us that “Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. Don’t ever give up, don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place.”
It was a battle cry disguised as a concession speech. Although it’s taken a while, I’m ready to get started.
Kamala Harris: The fight for our country is always worth it.
Joe Biden: Giving up is unforgivable
Is there a chance Trump has now consolidated all the power he needs to become an autocrat, a dictator? Absolutely. When people tell you who they are, believe them. But, might we still find ways to limit the damage, to make a midterm election and a democratic future possible? I’m counting on it.
I don’t know what that looks like yet. But what I want to say to you tonight is, don’t give up. Trump is not inevitable. Good people have found a way to defend democracy in other countries, and we will do it here too. Many of the people who thought they were voting for return-to-stability-Trump or I-will-fix-it-Trump are going to be in for a shock. People who voted their pocketbook without concern for their children, or at least their ability to find someone to clean their house, are going to be in for a rude awakening. We’ll get back on our game and be ready by the time Trump is sworn into office.
The problem is that on the economy, what matters is what people can see in front of their eyes, not what some bullcrap paywalled newspaper run by and for the financial parasite class says or what the talking heads on TV are saying. Food prices are still eye-poppingly high compared with before the pandemic. Housing prices are still out of reach for more and more people. Official inflation rates don’t reflect the price changes that everybody actually deals with when shopping. Wages are not keeping up with (real, as opposed to official) price increases. Yes, the economy is generating more and more wealth, but that isn’t going to the workers who actually produce it — it’s being siphoned off by the tiny layer of billionaires at the top, just as it has been since the Reagan administration. People are working harder and harder and getting nothing more for it.
Unfortunately a lot of people vote not for the party whose policies are most likely to fix the problem, but to punish those who are in power for failing to fix the problem, and those who make excuses and spout all these statistics that everybody can see are just gaslighting. They didn’t vote for Trump because they had some coherent reason for expecting that he’ll do any better, they did it to deliver a figurative baseball-bat smash in the teeth to the kind of people who keep telling them the economy is great and crime is down and all the rest of the bullshit. It’s not a smart thing to do and will obviously make most of the problems worse. But I do understand the impulse behind it.
That baseball-bat smash to the teeth is likely to be to their own faces. As Mencken put it, they’ll get what they voted for and “get it good and hard”.
I was obviously referring to the voters’ motives, not the likely results. I mentioned the likely results in the next sentence.
Those likely results seem to go ignored by the voters who then bitch about the easily predictable results they, themselves, help cause. It’s pretty hard to defend their obtuseness.
Jack:
On the 3rd, Jan and I will be in Chicago till the following Tuesday. I will stop by and see if Jan can come along too. Sometime during the week.
@Bill,
Be good to see you . Give me a call when you want to come .
Jack
I just came across this post on a website called Mr. Money Mustache. The author has the best take on the economy and inflation that I’ve seen. The Harris campaign could have used him.
Six Dumb Misconceptions About The Economy (that the Politicians Want You To Believe)
I followed the link. I liked the line “When the American middle class complains about how hard we have it these days, it’s like a bunch of overfed people at a buffet wishing they could just have one more flavor of donuts stacked onto the table.”
But we do have too many people who are not up into the middle class. Separating the trump supporters who really are left behind from the trump supporters who want more donuts would help in getting elected and help in discussing useful policy.
@Arne,
Good point. Any idea why more of those folks don’t join unions, instead preferring to believe that politicians should fix things for them?
How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades
@Joel,
The real hand to mouth and paycheck to paycheck people don’t get the opportunity to join unions typically. Union people tend to be middle class economically.
@Jack,
Stipulating that that’s correct, the Democrats would still do well to cultivate workers who could be represented by unions and to be the pro-union party. The working class and middle class voters have many interests in common. Too many stayed home in 2024.
Hard to know what more they could have done in that regard. Biden and Harris both expressed solidarity with the union movement and Biden walked the picket line with some strikers.
@Jack,
Yep. Of course, Biden wasn’t on the ballot.
I guess things are just going to have to get even worse before they figure out that banding together regardless of race and gender is the only way they can win back income and dignity. But Democrats need to support union membership and causes.
Joe wasn’t on the ballot but Kamala said she couldn’t think of anything he did she would change. She got criticized for that.
Frankly I think it’s time to stop excusing the voters for their choices. They chose what they’re about to get and the fact that their reasons were ignorant or foolish is on them. That they fell for Trump’s con suggests that it was going to be impossible to “educate” them. They didn’t want to hear it. They wanted the magic cure for prices that must have been Biden’s fault.
I think there is no one answer, but I also think (without solid evidence other than reading about what has happened to coal and steel and lumber mill jobs) that some of the people who feel left behind had parents in unions who had good jobs, but since the plants left town, there are no good union jobs without moving somewhere else.
If it were true that the jobs could be brought back, that would be better for people who have equity that they would otherwise lose. No politician can get their vote by telling them the jobs are not coming back.
It might be interesting to see if there are people who think that they are okay but less well off than the previous generation – who then report the economy is terrible.
@ Arne,
I doubt you think they should be told the jobs are coming back when they aren’t.
Jack,
We were talking about trump supporters. They were told the jobs could be brought back. I have doubts that anyone can reach them with the truth after they have joined the cult, jumped on the bandwagon, or started following the other lemmings.
“Is there a chance Trump has now consolidated all the power he needs to become an autocrat, a dictator? Absolutely….I don’t know what that looks like yet”
see, Strongmen: How they rise Why they succeed by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU Professor)
Democrats need to take a hard look at Kentucky. How the hell did Beshear, a Democrat, win the governorship in a heavily red state? What did he do to get so many Trump supporters to walk into the voting booth and vote Democrat? Obviously Republican voters can be swayed to vote Democrat. This the best place to start to figure out how.
BTW, I still believe Beshear with Wes Moore would have easily beat Trump.
Mark:
Neither are wearing a dress which is much of the issue,