Election Thoughts

Along with everyone else, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about last Tuesday’s election. The first results didn’t come in until around 2:30am. Kiel and I were staying in a hostel in Prague. We went back to sleep for an hour or so, but then checked again and it was worse. After that it became clear that we were really not going to sleep anymore that night; that the unthinkable had happened.

Shock, disbelief. I compulsively read political writing online. I’m in the sphere that would probably like to describe itself as progressive, but objective, fact-based, "reasonable". I read a lot of Vox and listen to a lot of NPR politics podcast. There’s also FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, occasionally the Atlantic. There’s obviously a political bias but we like to think we’re being fair. In this sphere there was no expectation that Hillary would lose. Every poll and every forecast put her ahead. There tends to be something of an echo-chamber in this sphere, especially as each newsroom gets smaller and smaller. Most importantly, our "reasonableness" makes it nearly impossible to spot fundamental changes in the system.
The devastation I feel from this election is all the more potent for my being a long-time Hillary supporter. I defended her, championed her, tried to convince skeptics that she was a winning candidate. I loved her appreciation for policy wonkery and for the messy business of politics. I saw her as the Hermione candidate, who works harder and is smarter than the boys but usually doesn't get the credit. That she was unjustly disliked (and hated) only endeared her more to me, the contrarian I am. I still think Hillary was the best candidate of them all to be president, but she may not have been the most electable. That someone like me was enthusiastic about her was an early warning sign (ditto for I-732). We don’t know what would have happened if Bernie Sanders had been nominated. There’s a decent chance that he could have beaten Trump, getting those votes in the great lakes states that Hillary lost. We already had enough support on the coasts, it was the Midwest that we needed. This would have been a good, exciting, and very unreasonable thing.
That said, anyone should have been able to defeat Trump. Ezra Klein made this point yesterday on Vox. Trump is unfit to be president of our country. A banana should have been able beat him. So then what?
I’m inclined to think it means our social fabric has rent to the point where we simply no longer have “common values” as a country. We work too many hours and live too far apart from one another and consume completely different information from people on the other side. So they become the enemy, so every political decision becomes a zero-sum fight, so all means are justified in opposition to the enemy.

The national system is rigged, however. It is rigged in favor of rural areas. This is a flaw that is revealing itself as the above phenomenon results in people moving to places where people agree with them politically. The cities become ever “bluer” and the rural areas ever more “red”. But the rural areas occupy a far greater area than the cities, and our system overwhelmingly favors size over population. The electoral college and the senate inherently favor rural areas. Democrats received 52% of the votes in senate races and only won 41% of the races. There is no perfect way to draw house districts, but it is probably both true that the concentration of democrats in small areas tends to lead to more Republican districts and that these have been manipulated to further favor Republicans. Finally, the electoral college is also just awful in many ways, meaning that winning the popular vote and losing the election may get more common if political self-sorting continues.

So now we have a government where every branch and chamber is controlled by the same party. That party has devoted itself for the last eight years to the failure of the sitting president, no matter what the consequences for the country as a whole. That course of action and it's ultimate success is disgusting and it is the sort of thing that makes even someone as knee-jerk “reasonable” as me question the legitimacy of our form of government.

Most of Obama’s policy legacy will probably be reversed in the next few years. It is going to be quantifiably bad for many people. And that’s just the Republican policy proposals. There’s also the looming threat of fascism. I suspect we’ll have more of a Berlusconi experience of incompetence and nepotism than Mussolini fascism, but that’s not shit you want to gamble on.  

The other reason Trump’s election is so upsetting because we have so little idea what he will actually do. He is totally unpredictable. He has barely sketched out policy proposals. One wonders, is he worse than regular republicans (like Mike Pence for instance)? Mainstream Republicans are awful because they actually have principles and these tend to be explicitly harmful for vulnerable people. Trump doesn’t have any principles apart from self-aggrandizement.
I can imagine a scenario in which he would quickly tire of congressional Republicans trying to control his office. I can imagine him actually eventually looking at the challenges that land on his plate and out of exasperation coming up with solutions that Democrats favor. He could be Democrats’ greatest friend in Washington (since democrats have no power there whatsoever now) if he starts fighting congress on their doctrinaire approaches to governing in favor of a more popular approach.
Clearly, though, Trump has changed the paradigm. We’re not in the post-war political universe anymore. That system held for the better part of a century. The country had already started to leave it behind when we elected Obama - but the parties didn’t come along until now. It is exciting in a way, if you disassociate yourself with the country you love or the people who will be harmed. If we were reading a book about the history of the United States, this would be an interesting chapter. There is room to write new things; there are new systems that need to be constructed.

A call has gone out already for people to organize and march and fight. I wish I could be there for the catharsis. I also know however that creativity works best with periodic bouts of intense work and then rest. We are all exhausted after this year-and-a-half-long shit show. We need to invent new ways for our political party and systems to function. For myself, I need to disengage, rest, consume art and other things. I will rest, and then I will come back to reengage. Clearly I, and the pundits and journalists I follow, have a poor understanding of how these fights are won. I will be more humble in my predictions and my preferences, and look more intently to those who seem to understand the spirit of the moment. We live in interesting times.