MDB and AZBlueMeanie Editorialize on Democratic Reaction to America’s Choice

Ed. MDB: I got a message from our AZBlueMeanie today with a post that sums up his reflections thus far on this election’s result (Emphases added by AZBlueMeanie):

Originally posted at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places under the title “The Billionaires’ Coup“:

Disinformation kills democracies—and our political climate is now one in which disinformation runs roughshod over all else

Once again, Americans have voted to send Donald Trump scuttling back into the White House. We are all very worn and it’s not a good morning for trying to piece together any grand narrative from that, and already on the various social platforms we’re seeing Hot Takes from all of the people who have made lucrative careers about being very wrong about everything.

Rather than attempting one of their triple-bank-shot explanations for why Americans saw the ugliest campaign ever waged and still voted for the coup-attempting narcissistic criminal who headed it, I think simpler explanations will suffice. Trump did nothing he hasn’t done for the last ten years. There were no October surprises. Disinformation flew fast and furious, as it has for the same ten years, and we knew it would. Indeed, the anecdotal voter interviews that have peppered the airwaves in the last six months have shown, incontrovertibly, that most voters believe very very false things and using those falsities to justify their ballots.

Here is what we know for certain:

1) Americans are much, much crueler people than we care to admit to ourselves. Trump closed out the campaign with overt racism and calls for ethnic cleansing, and Americans who voted him either liked the idea of ethnic cleansing very very much, cheering and egging him on, or at worst tut-tutted and claimed that it would be worth it because of some largely fictional belief about the economy being “better” back in the days of mass pandemic death.

This isn’t particularly surprising. But we like to pretend it isn’t there, even as Americans rally around monuments to murderous slaveholding rebels and set off pipe bombs to kill whoever their conspiracy theories have convinced them are enemies—the newspapers and television broadcasts go to great lengths to suppose that it is an expression of “economic anxiety” or that the people holding the torches only want their “culture” preserved. Pretending it isn’t there is, in every generation, the primary tool used to defend those hatreds.

2) In nearly every modern election we’ve seen the same result play out: People vote, often overwhelmingly, to protect abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights, and other cornerstones of the Democratic Party agenda. Then they pull the lever or fill out the bubble to elect Republicans to be the ones in charge of enacting that agenda.

We can piss around with bank-shot explanations of this all we want, but voters are quite consistent in producing this result. Americans want broadly liberal policies—and they want them to be delivered by pompously religious white men.

The simplest explanation for that is the one Trump voters themselves below. Voters want broad rights when they think those rights will go to people like them—and absolutely do not want those same protections if they think someone who does not look like them will be in charge of dispensing them.

We see this play out in healthcare debates, where broad portions of the (Southern, especially) electorate overwhelmingly approve of “Obamacare” policies but would rather chew their own feet off than let a Black president hand them out. Donald Trump is the avatar for the oldest sort of “identity politics” the nation has: Racism. Misogyny. The American demand to gain only if it involves taking from somebody else.

3) The most defining characteristic of this election, however, remains the same. It was a race held in a media environment in which factual information was not just deprioritized in favor of the stake-less professional gossipfests that every outlet insists to be the only true form of political coverage, but factual information was hidden from the public by those same sources. We heard all about Joe Biden’s alleged unfitness for office because The New York Times publisher and editors yellow-journalismed their way into making it a supposedly defining moment.

In the meantime, Donald Trump’s speeches show a man so reduced in form that many of his ramblings are literally incoherent—and you would not know that if you did not have to watch a steady stream of them, because those same editors scraped his actual words out of their stories in favor of reporting what a spokesperson later claimed Trump “meant.”

Flush all of that aside, and you would still be left with a social media and real-world media environment so stuffed with intentional disinformation that stumbling on true facts becomes a game of chance. Voter after voter responds to interviewer questions by saying nonsensical things that aren’t true, but that they believe to be true. Voters believe that Trump will “protect” abortion rights because that’s what they read—even as he brags of curtailing them. Voters believe Trump will only deport “bad” immigrants—even though the authors of those deportation policies insist that no, they mean to deport legal immigrants and the American children of legal immigrants both, whether criminal or pillars of their communities.

And that is because the media, the “free press” we like to blather on about with undeserved pride, has been fully and completely captured by (1) corporate entities that have a vested interest in feeding Americans some “truths” while hiding others, and (2) a collection of individual members of the billionaire class who dump more money into promoting intentional partisan disinformation than all of the rest of the American public can muster.

That’s not democracy. You can’t have democracy if that’s the playbook to be used; democracy hinges entirely on the ability of a citizenry to guide the direction of their country by examining the true state of the country and casting votes accordingly. If there is no true state to be determined—only a progression of “migrant caravans” that may or may not exist, or midwestern cities supposedly taken over by Muslims or captured by Columbian cartels, or a candidate who both brags of his anti-abortion record while well-dressed men on television claim the opposite—all of it is moot. The vote measures nothing. There are no “issues,” only dueling slates of propaganda.

And that is not where we are heading. That is where we are. It has happened. It has been happening for decades. It accelerated when Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched an entire news network devoted to manipulating the information environment. It accelerated when we abandoned protections that had been set in place to ensure no one wealthy freak of nature could single-handedly control a large portion of the entire nation’s communications apparatus. It is done.

And that is why the party that set a violent mob on the U.S. Capitol four years ago has seen no consequences, legal or otherwise, for an act of horrific betrayal. Those who own the media outlets insisted that the seditionists not be thrown out of our discourse, because the people who own the media outlets depend on those extremists to dismantle what they, too, need or want dismantled. The heads of CNN scrambled to find extremist voices willing and insistent on normalizing even criminal acts—and it has become a revolving door, as each of the extremists they bring to the air gets ejected again after doing or saying something that can no longer be papered over. Jeff Bezos intervened to blunt The Washington Post’s full assessment of Trump—because Jeff Bezos, the man, has a space program and government contracts to court.

As does his direct competitor, Elon Musk, a fellow billionaire who dismantled Twitter and replaced it with an engine to promote conspiracy theories and white supremacy.

Democracy cannot exist if facts do not exist, and political journalists, the parties, and the people who have purchased everything from our communications networks to their own Supreme Court justices are insistent, already, that facts do not exist.

That is where we are. Getting back will require defeating all of that—and a government soon to be headed by men who have very loudly declared their intent to never, ever give it back.

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Ed. MDB: What follows are my own reflections and do not necessarily reflect those of any others, including AZBlueMeanie.

While I agree with many of these above thoughts, they really are just complaints and lamentations about flaws in the epiphenomenon that define public discourse and democratic systems as currently practiced in America. Such a critique does not really penetrate the heart of our current crisis, which – in my view – is a result of the unfolding breakdown in the entire order of modernity upon which our current socio/economic order has been based for at least the last century. More saliently, perhaps they reflect a certain elite arrogance and sentiment that assisted our stumbling blindly into a staggering defeat. Perhaps they merely encourage Democrats to double down on efforts to ‘enlighten’ the masses that have signally failed.

As is often the case, historian Heather Cox Richardson succinctly sums up what seems to be emerging a majority sentiment about the causes and results of Trump’s victory, not by injecting her own opinions into the story, but by skillfully choosing themes and quotes from the players on the stage of history as it unfolds. Her statement of the current state of thought among many on the left is, I believe, highly accurate and insightful. Reading her short daily brief is entirely optional, but will properly contextualize much of what is to follow.

I am appending this interesting brief video by Damien Walter, appealing to the political imagination of our creatives, which I found very interesting for how it lays out the meta-narratives at work in this election, even before the results were known. Please watch it before continuing:

I, too, find it very interesting that Democrats have become the real conservatives of a (dying?) Modern socio/economic order in recent elections, and that the MAGA GOP has become a truly radical party trying to reimpose a slew of atavistic and ancient orders of religious/fascist/statist/natalist/feudalist socio/economic arrangements, or experiment with speculative weirdo visions of techno-post-humanism, for the lack of any viable alternative visions of a new socio/economic order that can address the real needs of average citizens in our rapidly decaying American systems.

I believe that most Democrats overwhelmingly would like to slowly and incrementally feel our way into the future trying to systematically and incrementally experiment our way into a New Order, while MAGA wants to try to deal with our crisis by smashing modernity and imposing an atavistic return to an older and already bankrupt order in the face of the radical changes in our socio/economic reality.

We are undoubtedly facing ‘interesting times’ as MAGA works its will on American government and society that will prove extremely painful and, indeed, deadly to many Americans. How the competing factions in MAGA will get the policies and power arrangements they seek to impose on ( or, more charitably, enact on behalf of) the American people is unknown. What I am certain of is that those choices and contests will inflict the highest costs upon those least able to protect themselves – ironically including many of the working class who helped the MAGA movement to power.

As frequently happens, some of our wisest and most incisive social commentary comes from humorists. I wholly agree with Trae Crowder, The Liberal Redneck, that we are going to see a lot of Americans die as a result of this election’s outcome. The radical changes that MAGA wants to make WILL absolutely carry a stiff tariff measured in American lives and well-being:

Humourist (note the British spelling) Jonathan Pie also expresses pretty well the zeitgeist of the moment and some of my own feelings and intuitions about the election result:

Our Blog Jester John (State Senator John Kavanaugh) recently commented on my post, “The People Have Spoken, the Bastards” the following:

“It is your condescending attitude about the voters, shared by many high-profile Democrats, that helped Trump win. Keep it up.”

While my post was meant as a wry riff on a common complaint against an unfavorable electoral result, perhaps the whole attitude IS counter-productive? Unusually, therefore, I actually took that comment to heart and really reflected if there was any truth or insight in the dig. I do think there is something to it. As they say, even a broken clock..! There is wisdom in taking your opponents’ critiques seriously when they get more votes than you did, IMO.

An overtly critical, or perhaps just Democratic Party skeptical, viewpoint and analysis of the election is summarized in David Brooks’ latest in the NYT. It is also worth a read as a preview and context of the rest of this post, and Jester John himself suggested it as a read for us Dems, and it therefore might be read as a more elaborate statement of his commentary thesis.

Are my own attitudes, and those of the Democratic Party at large, scornful and condescending? Are any of the critiques and soul-searching we are all seeing play out in the wake of what was – to us and many in the mainstream media, at least – a shocking result, just condescension and scorn for the average voters who pulled all those levers for Trump?

What is my attitude? Shock, anger, blaming the voters for misunderstanding what they just voted in favor of, certainly. Certainly. Are those feelings condescending toward those voters? Perhaps they are.

I do feel that this result was the product of a large number of low-information voters choosing what they naively saw as a candidate of change (Trump) over what they saw as a candidate of continuity (Harris). To the extent that I think that choice was poorly judged, I certainly AM being condescending. I DO believe that if those voters were truly engaged and analytic as to the demonstrable effects of the past Trump Admin and the current Biden Admin, they would have chosen otherwise. I think that feeling is pretty universal in the Democratic Party right now.

We see Biden (and Harris) as having piloted the COVID response which put the pandemic onto the back burner, the economic investments and careful policy that produced the strongest post-COVID economic recovery in the world, brought inflation under control, and provided an almost unprecedented soft landing without a recession while keeping employment low, among many other accomplishments. And we think, “why isn’t the electorate more grateful for this highly skillful result? Why don’t they want a whip-smart team of inheritors to continue the progress we’ve made? Mad Man Trump could never have pulled this off!”

We look at the Trump campaign and we see an incoherent candidate rage screaming for vengeance, naked self-interest and self-protection, naked racism and sexism and bigotry of almost every stripe, and who is clearly a stumblebum old fart rarely able to express a coherent thought, who lacks any policy agenda other than the monstrous Project 2025. And we think, “how could any person of average intelligence and common sense look at this mess and think it is a solution for the complex challenges we face? They must share some of the values that Trump is so clearly pronouncing as his own!”

But what if we are – as Jester John asserts – just not seeing that people voting for Trump are doing so rationally and with clear insight into what they are actually voting for?

In that view – and I would invite Jester John to correct me or elaborate as he pleases (please commenters refrain from any ad hominem attacks on John for this one post, at least) – Trump voters are hungry for change. They are getting a raw deal all around by the current order and getting very little help in the daily economic and social pains they are experiencing from Democrats who are reinforcing and defending the current order. Trump is at least railing against a rigged economic and social order that they also feel hard done by, so they rationally conclude he will follow through on his promises to make things right if people vote for him – despite any of the crap that may fly out of his mouth.

They rightly see that the act that he does is to get the attention of a corrupt media system and to piss off and frighten the elites whom both he and his voters detest. He doesn’t mean any of it literally and they certainly don’t share any or all of his bigoted views – they may even find it all distasteful, but see it as a necessary component of Trump’s successful performance that won him victory in 2016, and now, again in 2024. Those voters just want radical change to the system and Trump is the only one offering it. Trump did fine with the economy in 2017 to 2021, in their own experience, so why not let him have another crack at it?

This seems rather insane to us Democrats, who believe (perhaps rightly and objectively…) that Trump’s main accomplishment was just a massive tax abatement for the wealthiest and the unnecessary and premature death of over 1 million Americans with a botched handling of COVID. And that the bigoted and vile crap he spews into our public discourse is the true expression of his, and his followers’, core beliefs and values.

But lots of folks don’t share those conclusions: the economy was subjectively better for them in that period, so they don’t much care about wealth distribution across the economy, or macroeconomic facts like ballooning deficits, trade wars, and knock-on effects. Those folks think that Trump did his best to deal with an unavoidable health crisis and – if they aren’t vaccine skeptics – rightly point out that he helped create the vaccines through Project Warp Speed to bring COVID under control. Anything less than optimal in Trump’s first term was just tough luck and the result of the mighty resistance to anything with Trump’s stank on it by liberal elites. Why not put him back on the job and see if he can deliver what he promises?

Perhaps I am still showing some of my bias against Trump (‘derangement syndrome’, if you like) and condescension, but I think that is a fairly reasonable statement of the case in favor of Trump. I’ll trust you to point out where I have erred if I’m inaccurate, Jester John.

If I’m anywhere near the mark, perhaps real the lesson we Democrats need to learn from this result is simply that we need to truly provide a vision of a new order in which working- and middle-class voters’ interests are truly prioritized above those of the current elites, without any self-censorship based on anticipated resistance from the elites or opposition. We Democrats have grown accustomed to accommodating the commanding heights of the economy and culture through the Neo-Liberal and Third Way politics that became dominant in the ’90s under the Clintons. Perhaps Benie’s conclusions about why we lost are entirely right:

Perhaps we should not be defending or conserving any aspect of the current order, but swearing to squash the rights and privileges of current elites in favor of the common man and woman. With Biden and Harris we Democrats did, truthfully, only make promises to work within the current socio/economic order to provide some small and specific increments of relief to regular working folks, mainly with the most incrementalist system possible of tax breaks and credits and spending priorities that we knew we could actually achieve with our bare majority in Congress, mainly through budget reconciliation. In any case, I think that Bernie’s critique has a great deal of validity and he should become more central to the Democrats’ vision, not less so.

Perhaps we are being too realistic and too reasonable? Like Trump, we should perhaps instead swing for the fences and let the American voters know that should they support us we will do everything possible to make our vision of a new order that puts them first a reality. Just blame any resistance on ‘the elites’ and ‘the opposition’ should we fall short, always double down, never apologize, and never retreat or settle for less. That’s what Trump does; so perhaps we must envision a new order and just work toward it, not just promise reasonable small ameliorations for working America’s pain, but demand a fundamental reorganization of social and economic imperatives, and really truly mean it and fight for it?

Democrats have done that in the past: we could do it again. Perhaps it’s time to reinvigorate the kind of truly revisionist impulses Progressives asserted during American industrialization through the Post-WWII era? Perhaps such a fundamental shakeup is what is needed to counter Trump’s (obviously – to us – false) promises to make real changes in favor of the working people of America. Certainly, I think we can at least be more credible in such an assertion of a ‘novus ordo seclorum‘ than cosplaying elites like bullshit billionaire Trump, or real billionaire Musk?

We had better damn well try. We have seen now two of the past three Presidential elections go to an obvious huckster and notorious liar merely pretending to act as a herald of the common man. That lying orange bag of shit has fully displaced whatever remained of America’s conservative party with a MAGA vision of atavistic counter-revolution dressed up in drag as a populist movement. The old Republican conservative elites simply don’t have a meaningful constituency anymore. Trump’s popular vote did actually decline by several million votes, which are perhaps the remaining constituency of the truly conservative Republicans. They are not enough for us to cobble together a center-right coalition inside the Democratic Party that can command sufficient popular majorities.

Instead of embracing the rump of ‘real conservates’ ejected from the GOP, we might consider the alternative of building and expressing a whole-hearted Progressive agenda that puts protecting the working people of America first in the coming waves of change crashing over our economy and culture? By pitching our tent to include and accommodate the refugees from the now fully MAGA GOP, we are just cementing our worst and losing impulse to protect the commanding heights of the passing Modern Order. We ought instead to be extending our tent for those with a new populist vision of the future in which the common man is truly king.