Tuesday's Moral Catastrophe

Despite electoral defeat, liberalism will need to try to seize the moral high ground

As advocates of liberal democracy—this publication’s constituency—dig our way out of the rubble of Tuesday’s electoral earthquake, we wonder: How much policy mayhem may the second Trump administration bring? How much corruption and incompetence? How many persecutions and pardons, deportations and internments? How many trade wars, ruptured alliances, and calls to civic violence? How many more threats to prosecute and imprison his political rivals? There is no telling, except to say that the damage will be considerable for all the reasons that have been well rehearsed in these pages.

At this gloomy time, I’m afraid I need to deepen the gloom. Those of us who believe in, and fight for, liberal democracy need to consider the possibility that the greatest damage Trump’s victory will do is not in the sphere of economics or foreign policy or the rule of law. We need to view the election as a moral defeat.

Tocqueville: Elections Determine Norms

Writing almost 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed something true and important about the United States: In America, democracy is not only a political system but also a moral arbiter. Being of many creeds, countries, and faiths, Americans set their ethical compass in part by looking to the democratic process. Electoral victory carries moral weight; it validates the values, the normative claims, of the winning side. If the people are against you, the idea goes, you’re probably wrong. You can insist that the public has decided wrongly, incompetently, indecently. You can say, as Morris Udall cracked about his defeat in the 1976 Democratic presidential primary, “The people have spoken—the bastards.” But Udall’s quip was funny because raging against the majority, in America, gets you precisely nowhere.

This was what Tocqueville was getting at in his famous observations about the tyranny of the majority, which he believed was the greatest threat to freedom. Though he worried that majorities might abuse their power at the ballot box, his bigger concern was that the weight of majority opinion carries an almost unopposable social and moral force. Those who are out of step with majority opinion are treated as morally infirm and socially suspect.

“Today,” wrote Tocqueville in his 1835 classic, Democracy in America:

the most absolute sovereigns of Europe cannot prevent certain ideas hostile to their authority from circulating silently within their States and even within their courts. It is not the same in America; as long as the majority is uncertain, people speak; but as soon as the majority has irrevocably decided, everyone is silent, and friends as well as enemies then seem to climb on board together.

This is more than merely about what it is that people are willing to say; Tocqueville is concerned with what is considered acceptable to believe. “In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought,” he wrote. The result is to shape norms in ways that influence everything downstream, including politics: “I think that the small number of outstanding men who appear today on the political stage must be attributed, above all, to the always increasing action of the despotism of the majority in the United States.”

Defining Deviancy Down

Tocqueville’s insight ramifies today. Prior to Election Day 2024, it was possible for defenders of liberal democracy, pluralistic politics, and decent civic behavior to regard ourselves as morally normative. Sure, we had previously lost an election to a talented demagogue. Maybe that was partly our fault. But we could still consider our values to be mainstream and the other side’s to be aberrant.

What happened last Tuesday shattered those norms, or whatever was left of them. Trump’s win was decisive, not marginal. It left no doubt where a governing majority—and probably, when all the votes are counted, a numerical majority—stood.

Perhaps this was the fault of Kamala Harris and her flawed party? Perhaps they wandered too far toward left-wing fever swamps, evaded too many questions, and chose the wrong running mate? Perhaps they would have won if President Biden had stepped aside earlier, allowing a true primary process to unfold?

Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll never know. Here is what we do know: Given the constraints that she and the Democrats faced, Harris ran an exemplary campaign. She avoided seeming to nudge Biden aside (thus making it easier for him to step aside); united the party within 32 hours of his withdrawal; proved dynamic and effective on the stump; picked a broadly acceptable running mate; out-fundraised and out-organized her opponent; crushed him in their only debate; and showcased normal political behavior, contrasting with the “weird” other side. She also signaled in unmistakable ways—like campaigning with Liz Cheney, and announcing she’d appoint a Republican to her cabinet—that she was moving to the center, distancing herself from the left-wing views she championed during the 2020 presidential primary.

Trump, on the other hand, campaigned as if he wanted to lose. By conventional norms, he did everything wrong. He ridiculed his opponent’s race and ethnicity, suggested that a Democratic leader face a firing squad, and accused Black immigrants of eating pets. He “danced” spastically, rambled incoherently, discussed Arnold Palmer’s penis, and headlined a demented political rally where a speaker called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” He used nakedly fascistic rhetoric (immigrants “poison the blood of our country”) and was called a fascist by some of his former military advisers and aides.

The voters knew all of this. They looked squarely at the choice. And they chose Trump.

The Moral Minority

We on the liberal-democracy side need to recognize the implications. We lost more than the election. We also lost the standing to claim that our values represent the moral mainstream. We now must function in a world where MAGA not only controls the country’s government but defines its norms—more, at least, than we do.

This will make it harder to hold ground from which to criticize Trump and MAGA, no matter what they do or say. When we protest the latest Trump outrage (and there will be many), we will be accused of elitism and irrelevance. “If you’re the moral arbiters,” MAGA’s allies will say, “why can’t you persuade anybody? Why is it that no one cares about your indignation? Might it be because the public is tired of your moral grandstanding? Might it be because you’re wrong?” We’ll have to fight for moral oxygen these next few years, and it’s a fight we might not win.

Complicating matters further: In the teeth of the election’s permissioning of grotesque political behavior, those who have stood firm against MAGA’s depredations will feel even more pressure to give way or stand down. Some will lack the energy to keep insisting that MAGA is not morally normal; others will conclude that criticizing MAGA is futile or counterproductive, and also potentially dangerous; yet others will, as Tocqueville warned, internalize the electorate’s verdict, concluding that the majority of American voters can’t be wrong. However it happens, we must expect a struggle to maintain our own moral confidence—again, a fight we might not win.

The Bible’s Jewish prophets lived in societies where they were moral exiles, preaching against corruption which they knew to be the norm. They preached anyway. So must we. But we must be prepared, politically and psychologically, for a period of political marginalization, public ridicule, and self-doubt. The Tocquevillean engine of majority opinion has turned, if not against us, then at least indifferent to us. In order to defend democracy in America, we will have to turn it back.

© The UnPopulist, 2024