Trump won because people voted, supposedly, on issues and not character. That was the cardinal error. Policies can be changed but character can’t, and what people don’t seem to realize is that bad character in a leader will lead to bad policies down the road anyway.
Comments like yours are hypocritical and ridiculous, and show how two faced politics is. Character is never an issue in politics until people pretend it's one. Which aspects of Biden's character did you personally like? Harris's? They're proven liars as well and they were obviously just puppets for a larger machine that was pulling the strings.
I would wager that a solid majority of those who voted for Donald had no clue about any of the things that reflect negatively on him. That information does not permeate the reality that’s been created for them by their media diet and their churches.
The voters who outnumbered each sides voters are the ones who decided to sit this one out. And if we are going to turn the ship around somehow those are the people we are going to have to reach. Why are they disengaged? What are their dreams, needs, fears, realities? It is going to be painful to watch the damage that’s about to be inflicted on so many because the GOP has not been good at governing for a very long time. With any luck(and I type this with bile in my throat), they will screw things up so catastrophically that they’re madness will be shown for what it is once and for all and the naked emperor will be left with nowhere to hide.
Biden has been obviously, seriously cognitively impaired throughout his entire term, and the media quite literally hid it from the world. The emperor's clothes were burned a long time ago.
This is why his handlers won't allow him to go unscripted or answer questions. Just look at how he's willing to answer questions and his handlers disallow it. The president agrees to answer questions and his crew won't allow it. This is elder abuse at best, and a shadow government controlling Biden at worst.
There is a sense in which this is true, but, ironically, the best course of action, personal and political is to treat the election as just a loss of a political argument. _Some_ ,especially some politicians, hold truly illiberal and anti-democratic values, but we should not overinterpret this as applying to all or even necessarily very many Trump voters. And it is better to address them as having what we think is a mistaken "model" of how basically shared values get cashed out into policy.
But id like you to say that to the women who'll need healthcare in certain states,undocumented immigrants, protected and endangered species, researchers from NOAA.....farmers who'll lose their markets...
It's reality, but you're so clueless and self absorbed about the consequences to others in your prescriptive solutions.
"Seize the moral high ground"? One big motivation for many Trump voters was their perception that as far as they could see, they saw only moral low ground--the long string of lies about Biden's decline, how Biden was dumped without competition for replacement, the giveaways to favored constituents, the shameless contradictions of past position, media intimidation, the 51 intelligence officers assuring that the Hunter laptop was not real, and on and on. Voters saw a career politician vs a career businessman-entertainer. The polls showed that they overwhelmingly disliked the character of both candidates and the inside maneuvering of their respective parties. Starving for political reform, the decisive voters chose change from the outsider not the insider.
Would that the parties and their operatives climb for the moral high ground. They make great verbal claims on that high ground, but they party on in the lowlands.
Even if everything that you think about the Biden administration were 100% correct, voting for someone manifestly and openly corrupt won’t fix the problem, it’ll make it worse. I simply don’t understand this logic and it smacks of back filling: because I wanted to vote for a moral cretin like Trump, I’ll pretend that everyone is just as bad.
Looking at the pessimistic note here I am just wondering why we here in India don't give up so easily on pursuing the liberal democratic agenda even after stunning defeats.
Is it because we are too large a population to be led by one thought?
Is it because power is not the only glue that unites India, it is something more basic like a way of thinking that need not be changed?
Or ultimately is it because we in India have an electoral system where one election is not the end of the world for five years?
Lok Sabha elections and state elections are held on different days and even years giving hope to vanquished to pick up the gauntlet again, to talk about their beliefs and ideologies and many times the vanquished are victorious in State Assemblies giving them hope and energy to continue with their beliefs.
The Modi Regine is trying to change that by advocating One Nation One Election probably guided by his dear friend Donald Trumps America but after reading this piece I think we must continue with our system of elections to keep hope alive.
What I think about the Biden-Harriss administration was not the subject of my post. The main subject is the motivation of many people to vote for Trump. Another subject was the difference in perspectives about the morality of the two sides (not even of the two candidates). Perhaps, to use your phrase, voters were voting between the "openly corrupt" and the secretly. What you read into my post instead of reading the post was your own perspective.
Well, you did say "Would that the parties and their operatives climb for the moral high ground. They make great verbal claims on that high ground, but they party on in the lowlands." - implying an equivalence between the morals of the two parties. They're not equivalent.
I believe you would like to convict me of moral equivalence. At the level of "we are all sinners" I plead guilty. However, let's take the climbing metaphor I used. If you believe that a climber starting at the base of Everest is equivalent to one starting half way up, then you have the everyone is a sinner equivalence. Same if you believe all routes to the top are just routes to the top. Both parties and their candidates chose some tactics that were the same, some different. You obviously think Harriss and Democrats had the higher ground (at whatever moral elevation it might have been). Other people who are also sane and intelligent disagreed. And I implied no choice or equivalence.
Voters chose the lesser of 2 evils and the fact that the Left were so flagrant in censoring freedom of speech, upon which all other rights were formed seemed like the most important thing to protect. If you lose certain 'lesser' rights, this can be remedied through freedom of speech. If you lost the freedom to fight for those rights, all is lost. This is how I read the election results.
It's really simple, and the Left refuse to acknowledge out of sheer partisan interests, that Trump is less corrupt than the regime that is behind Biden.
The moral high ground is to believe in the promise of individual rights and the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness as outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Trump champions illiberal methods (due process in particular is a favorite one to ignore), and that this many people are fine with it is absolutely disheartening.
I’ll not beat up on you for imprecision, but the American “pursuit” is not of life, liberty, happiness, rather its that we have Creator-endowed unalienable rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (in the Constitution this is rendered as a right to Property).
But even if we stipulate that Trump is illiberal, is the Democratic Party, the party of abortion and religious persecution not far, far worse in terms of violating human rights?
Claiming a fetus is the same as a person is a *religious* definition. Fetuses don't have rights.
Oh yeah, the party of the Muslim ban is definitely not into religious persecution.
And translating the Pursuit of Happiness to be specifically property is ridiculous. But since conservatives worship wealth these days it makes sense why you'd think that.
Every conservative argument boils down to not liking that the promise of America is one of a multi-racial and multi-religion state where all are treated equally.
• Okay, if you maintain that those complete, distinct, living, growing human beings as yet unborn do not have rights, let’s set this aside for a moment, so I may ask, do born people have rights? Why do you think so? Is this simply stipulation, did you just DECIDE they have rights?
• Again, I’m no fan of Trump, but there was no “Muslim ban,” there was a ban, a temporary one as I understand it, on entrants from a certain very few countries. Majority Muslim ones, to be sure, but a small percentage of the total number of such nations
• You had alluded to life liberty and happiness in both Declaration AND Constitution. Well, in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment it’s rendered Life, Liberty, Property. It is to this I was referring to
• That “all should be treated equally,” a proposition i heartily agree with by the way, is itself based upon religious, or if you prefer, metaphysical antecedent principles. This takes us back to the question of whether humans have rights. Certainly governments may grant certain rights and privileges, but these are by definition alienable, they can be revoked with a change in law or policy. Our rights are only unalienable if they originate instead in our Creator, as the Declaration affirms, and the Constitution assumes (in the Second and Ninth Amendments, human rights are treated as pre-existing, pre-political, inhering in the humanity of their possessors).
So if humans, as humans have a right to life, why would not a human an hour before birth not have the same rights as one an hour afterward? She is the same, identical entity. All that is different is her location
Somebody who has a tight grip on the GOP and the propaganda services of a very large cable network and a slew of well-funded podcasts and some major editorial pages and even pastors of evangelical churches across the land -and who already held the presidency - is not an "outsider."
And while Harris is not perfect, just as no one is perfect, the moral bankruptcy of Donald Trump is in another category altogether. Most glaring is his aggressively self-centered worldview, along with casual cruelty and total indifference to the true/false distinction. He ticks off every box in the diagnostic criteria for 2 or 3 psychiatric disorders that are characterized by extreme selfishness and lack of a conscience. Even Jeffrey Epstein - his best friend for over a decade - observed that he had no moral compass.
A modest amount of time observing how the two candidates comported themselves during their campaigns would make it pretty obvious to any fair and rational observer that Trump has serious character defects, while Harris has a normal measure of human imperfection.
As a few observers noted, the election did not hinge on voters' judgment of character as much as it hinged on their preference of path and team. Yes, Harriss has fewer blemishes on her character or disturbing idiosyncrasies, but it may have come down to two factors.
First, the decisive voters were fed up with or disturbed by "woke" politics. Harriss certainly embraced in past and present that trend.
Second, Americans often react to social stresses--economic or cultural--by blaming government and voting for what seems like change.
The Trump campaign played on both parts of the American character and increased the vote for Trump and Congressional candidates among most voting groups except white women. Harriss could not shed her identification with inflation or woke policies and people. An example of the latter was choosing Walz as her running mate.
You implied a moral equivalency in the tone of the two campaigns - and by extension, in the two candidates.
Some have faulted Harris for running a campaign that relied too much on setting a positive agenda rather than going after Trump on his malignant psychopathology and criminality. Maybe the campaign was spooked by the claims that doing so was a direct incitement to assassination - while few people know that someone was arrested for a plot against Harris.
The Trump campaign was centered on fearmongering and demonization - with Trump sweepingly calling his opponents "vermin, scum, garbage, sick, evil ...." and saying they "hate America" and are intentionally trying to "destroy" it. "Democrats hate America" is a common theme in the GOP.
Harris didn't fall for Brett Bair's effort to bait her into insulting Trump voters. There's no way that Trump would have passed up a similar opportunity. Harris finished her campaign on an upbeat note, while Trump doubled down on malignance. The moral tone of the campaigns started at the top, and there the contrast is stark.
A part of the electorate revels in Trump’s malignance. But another factor in the equation is that he has been judged by a very different standard almost from the beginning. He can go as low as he wants and still be indulged in a way that no other politician ever has been.
Historically, liberals are always in the minority even though we have just lived through unprecedented times of that not being true. However, I voted for Trump because of the choice I was given. I consider the man a crass, belligerent, mildly racist poltroon. I think he tried to seize power with force on January 6 2020 and planned his strategy to do so long before.
Why did I vote for him? Because Harris and Democrats are just as cynically lying. Biden is mentally incapable of being president right this moment and has been so for quite some time. Democrats not only continue to lie about this but they also expect us to look past their judgment that Biden was not competent enough to run for president but also just fine to remain Commander in Chief. The election is what concerned them. Not the country.
Democrats do not care about liberalism or America. They care about their power. If that isn’t true, why allow Biden to remain uncontested? Why lie about it? Republicans are surely no different but that’s that is the problem.
Second, the system successfully thwarted Trump’s effort to seize power through force so he came back and did so peacefully and through legitimate means. That is the system working to my mind. The people wanted what he offers and rejected what Democrats offer. It wasn’t a rejection of liberalism, it was a repudiation of Democrats.
I agree that illiberal behavior should be contested when we see it and surely we shall see it in the coming administration. We would have seen it had Trump lost and we did see it these past 4 years. Given the choice of illiberal actors checked by republican government, I made my choice.
I fully agree that it was a choice between two bad options. But to choose Trump, who lies more often than he tells the truth, and as you said, tried to seize power with violence, over Democrats who failed to say that their incumbent was unfit for office fast enough, is like sending back overcooked chicken at a restaurant and choosing to eat cement instead.
Considering all the Left has done is lie, lie, lie this is the pot calling the kettle black.
Trump won because he doesn't budge and inch on his beliefs and policies and people know exactly what they're getting.
He quite literally campaigned on the same principles he campaigned on in 2016
Energy independence, secure border, stronger economy, make America great again.
The difference this time is that the first time he won, he was not prepared to win and his transition was unprepared. This time he's experienced, knows what's coming and is prepared for it. He's been preparing a transition team for months before the election.
It can NOT be stated enough, that Tulsia Gabbard and RFK aided his campaign and added legitimacy and strength to his base. If his goal is to root out corruption, there is no better political candidate to align yourself with than RFK, who has done it for a living for decades.
Exactly what we're getting is a person who has no concerns about the guarantee of rights this country was founded on. I don't care what you *think* you're getting from him, it's not worth it if it doesn't align with the very bedrock of what made this country great in the first place.
I guess I'd need to know exactly what you're talking about since Dems are just as guilty of violating American principles as Republicans (or Trump) are.
I just think the Dems at this point are much larger offenders to democracy than Trump has been, and the only reason people don't see that is because up until this election the Left had a monopoly on the mainstream.
This is the 1st election that was won despite the efforts of the mainstream media. Trump's campaign was fought in the trenches of podcasts, and through independent media.
And this is where the large disconnect is. The Dems still think the mainstream is where it's at, when in fact, it's a dinosaur on it's last breath and they haven't realized that yet.
The base that voted resoundingly for Trump ignored the mainstream.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Pretty straightforward. You don't get to restrict healthcare for women. You don't get to lock up your political opponents. You don't get to put millions of immigrants into camps for deportation. You don't get "one really violent day". You don't get to make it illegal for people to criticize you, or the Supreme Court.
Yes! Pray that intelligent people stop rolling over with the expectation that his winning a slim majority of votes means he need not be opposed for his utter immorality.
Do you have an immigration policy to your home? Do you leave the front door open and let anyone walk in? Or do you remove illegals from your home? Asking for a friend.
Regarding 'locking up political opponents' this is a fabrication of the political Left with no substance. Trump was in office for 4 years, FOUR YEARS and did not lock up Hilary Clinton, even though she funded the Russian Collusion hoax against him.
He has never stated he was going to lock up political opponents, even though the Left has weaponized the Justice system against him.
But there certainly should be an investigation into whether or not the justice system was weaponized. I'm all for that.
Finally, regarding women's health care.
The US is the single worst country in the world for health care, and you can't blame Trump for that. Democrats have ruled the White House for the majority of the last few decades.
Why have they not reformed health care like every other Western country has?
He has never stated he was going to have "one violent day" or make it illegal to criticize him...but that is EXACTLY what the Left is trying to do with their censorship wall.
Or have you already forgotten how Biden trying to have a "ministry of truth" installed to dictate what is and isn't true? That's rich, coming from the person who censored the free speech of the American people for his own gain.
It appears now 2weeks later that the popular vote is barely a majority: 50% for Trump, 48% for Harris. This is a slim “mandate.” The danger is responding as the author describes and it is on the Republicans to show if they have any moral character left.
Melodramatic claptrap. It seems to me that Democrats are discovering that the conservative, religious and patriarchal Hispanic men they’ve been importing ostensibly to vote for them has backfired in their faces.
Must say that xenophobic nonsense should not be treated with a "pretty please" attitude . We have what we have now because white liberals looked the other way for far too long when it came to legalization if the undocumented.
We're both of indian origin , advanced degrees and the assumptions these xenophobic individuals make is that attacking the undocumented popn is ok with others who don't fit the profile of an undocumented immigrant, and they won't fight back.
Must say that xenophobic nonsense should not be treated with a "pretty please" attitude . We have what we have now because white liberals looked the other way for far too long when it came to legalization if the undocumented.
We're both of indian origin , advanced degrees and the assumptions these xenophobic individuals make is that attacking the undocumented popn is ok with others who don't fit the profile of an undocumented immigrant, and they won't fight back.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Trump campaigns openly against the very foundation and promise of what America stands for. These rights extend to all people, not just the ones you like.
Abortion is not healthcare. I’m pro choice politically but this is just a lie to put your position above moral objection, which it is not. It’s a hard issue because you have conflicting rights at play. I thought Roe should not be overturned but the states are settling it as their electorates see fit. This is in fact democracy, as opposed to rule by nine justices.
I notice that we are still trying to lock up Trump. What would you call that? This isn’t locking up your political opponent?
But you forgot some words:
“…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it ... But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Duty. If we indeed have elected a tyrant, you are duty bound to overthrow his rule. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
Why are Kamala and Biden saying to cool off and it will be OK? Didn’t they spend all summer telling us this would be our last election ever if Trump won? That he would seize power like Emperor Palpatine?
Well? Obviously they were lying as we already knew.
What abortion laws prevent is exactly healthcare. Anywhere from 10-25% of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion and some of those absolutely require medical care to prevent complications.
In certain instances women are forced to carry to term knowing the baby will die on birth.
Again, this is just cloaking an argument in self righteous morality. Surely abortion laws can prevent wholesale abortion while permitting situations where health is in danger to be treated as the medical emergencies they are. I would say the same for “all abortion is murder” or the ever absurd canard “except for rape and incest” as if the state could reliably determine those details within the window of a pregnancy.
It’s funny but I think the lies Democrats are continuing to tell me right now are just as egregious. Biden is clearly incapable mentally. Democrats have admitted as much by forcing him out of the race. But he can remain president because the only thing they care about is their electoral chances.
I get forcing him out of the White House is a tougher ask but I’ve heard nary a peep about it. I’m supposed to swallow this lie without objection just as I was expected to swallow the lie it was for the past 2 years until they got caught with their pants down in that debate. Everyone was surprised by Biden’s senility even though I wasn’t and I’m just sitting here on my couch.
Yeah, I don’t but it. I think Democrats knew Harris would be deeply unpopular but they were stuck so they tried to squeak by with Biden until that lie became untenable. Then, they pushed the old man out but it was too late.
The party is surely free to choose their candidate however they wish but pretending to have a primary where the serious contenders (some of whom I may well have voted for) were sidelined and then backdooring the worst candidate in recent memory was a stupid decision and quite frankly, Democrats got what they deserved. Maybe the fault is more with Biden but I really don’t care. He should have stepped aside.
Perhaps with this resounding defeat, the party will moderate itself and go back to representing its electorate instead of a bunch out of touch elites.
Trump's resounding win in 2024 is evidence that the Left may have compromised democracy to win in 2020. They certainly tried hard to lie to people about the Hunter Biden laptop story (and succeeded for a time) and they certainly lied to people about many aspects of the pandemic. BOTH of these things affected the vote in 2020.
There is NO WAY they win in 2020 with a level playing field...level meaning they allow the truth of both the laptop and the pandemic to spill into the open, unchecked.
It certainly did affect the vote because people like yourself who live in the world of conspiracy theories voted in that election. Beyond that, not so much. If I may respectfully make a suggestion, put yourself in conspiracy theory detox. Stop listening to Joe Rogan or at least listen to other voices with an open mind. It would help you process the complexity of the world. From your comments on this site, it is pretty clear that you have a mental block that prevents you from processing any argument or analysis beyond your pet peeves. There is no piece that doesn't lead to the Hunter Biden laptop. It bespeaks of an unhealthy obsession and, at this point, we have all heard you many times over and don't think we will profit from you making that point yet again. So perhaps think of of new arguments or consider just withdrawing from this site.
I want you to know that I personally don't like conflict. I also respect that this is your publication and hate having to disagree with you, but until the Left starts acknowledging it's moral errors and hypocrisy, it needs to be brought up.
I know you perceive me as this 'right wing conspiracy theorist' but that's just an unfounded ad hominem.
I'm personal friends with Bernie Sanders; long time campaign manager. I don't disclose my personal name here because it's common to attack people in real life for their beliefs these days, thanks to the Democrat's hate mongering for anyone who disagrees with them.
I was a huge Bernie fan. I watched Hilary's power hungry corruption utterly destroy Bernie's chances at the Presidency and watched as filthy money pushed her to the forefront, only to lose against Trump.
I'm a lifelong old school Liberal and have always lived by those principles of personal freedom, accountability and less government / war / corruption.
The Liberal parties of the world (not only in the USA) have left these things in the dust, exchanging these ideologies for corporate power and money. They try to sound like Liberals but act nothing like them. The WEF, led by 200 countries and 800 corporations is pushing it's values into the lives of individual citizens through these far Left governments, guided by an anti-human, anti-science ideology.
Just look at some of the things they are coming up with.
Math is racist?
Humans are bad for the planet and we need less of them?
Trees are bad for the environment?
Everything is a fabrication, an unnatural construct, much like Hilary's push in 2016, Biden's election in 2020 and Kamala's run for 2024.
Nobody wanted those to happen and yet somehow they continue to push them.
Why?
Biden was incompetent to lead from the very beginning. Everyone knew it except for the Democratic party.
Nobody wanted Kamala. Everyone knew it except for the Democratic party.
The stock market knew it. Hamas knew it. Russia knew it. And more than half of Americans knew it.
I brought up the Hunter Biden laptop repeatedly because it is a clear example of the brutal corruption within the Democratic party. The FBI, based on Biden's word suppressed the story and it all ended up being true. It's a full on conspiracy that's been proven.
The people voted because they are tired of the lies and lack of accountability. And accountability is coming just as millions of people whose lives have been destroyed by this lack of accountability have been crying for.
Musk voted for Obama.
Rogan voted for Bernie in 2020.
Tulsi was a Democrat.
RFK was a Democrat.
Rather than double down on the lunacy, and smear anyone who disagrees, maybe a little self reflection is in order on how the Democratic party got ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED in this election. I know which side of history I want to be on, and it's not on the side of a party who can't be reasoned with.
It's not a good look right now.
BTW, where did those 11 million Democrat voters that voted Biden in go? Strange that the Democratic party is so convinced they're right when 11 million less people voted for them.
This is misguided: "We need to view the election as a moral defeat." No, the election defeated the Democrat's immorality and I say that from a position far to "left" of the Democratic Party, although I've always voted Democratic.
The Democrat's moral defeat has come on slowly and has been the work of anti-Democrat left extremists. They have captured the minds of most Democrats with disinformation delivered through our "left" press.
Consider BLM
Their 3 leaders are "well-trained Marxists" who follow the teachings of "our beloved Assata Shakur" who was a leader of the Black Liberation Army in the early 1970s. Her mission was to assassinate police and Rob banks to buy guns for the revolution.
20 million Democrats followed them on self-righteous marches that resulted in an additional 5,000 Black Lives lost to criminals when they discouraged the police from fighting crime proactively.
All of this was based on completely idiotic statistical analysis published in the Washington Post starting in 2015 and continuing. (I took a field in stats when getting my econ PhD at UC Berkeley, and would be happy to document this and other claims for the UnPopulist).
In fact, if the police were to police the Black community as they police the White community in proportion to the murder rate (instead of Under-Policing violent crime in Black Communities) they would kill several times more Blacks than they do. (And they would like to reduce the murder rate to something near the non-Black murder rate.) I'm not condoning their violence, I'm just saying the Post's racial-Police-killings story is utter nonsense.
There are many other such examples of Democrats being misled into tremendously immoral behavior while condemning the working class for their immorality. And, Yes, the working class knows that the police save lives and defunding them is massively murderous.
It's time for Persuasion and The UnPopulist to learn some math, do some research into many areas, and explain the moral crimes being invited by our extreme left. They are the ones responsible for Trump. And they did this once before between 1964 and 1972 when they cut the Democratic vote by 40% in 8 years. As McGovern admitted, 20 million people left the Dems. We had 67% of the working class in 1964 and 30% in 1972. And, No, that was not due to civil rights. We got the 67% four months After LBJ passed the civil rights bill and after it had made headlines for a year. It was radical left violence and anti-Americanism that lost the working class, much like today. Then as now, the working class defeated extreme far-left immorality.
Can you make the case that anything you've just typed above actually had an impact on the 2024 election? Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor whose candidacy was rejected by the Black Lives Matter movement, and she was not a proponent of defunding the police. I'm having trouble understanding your claim that this election was a referendum on what you call "extreme far-left immorality." Kamala Harris was just as much a representative of the Democratic neoliberal establishment as Joe Biden, and that's what lost against Trump.
That's a fair question. Kamala did several interviews that supported "Defunding." Search this CNN headline "Kamala Harris praised ‘defund the police’ movement in June 2020 radio interview." No I don't think she buys that. But she lied through her teeth about Biden and busing during the primary debates. I live in Berkeley I know that history and Biden's. The one truly independent voter I know does not trust her at all. But here's big picture answer.
If you check the right-wing press, they always make the most of the craziest Dem representatives, AOC, Sanders, DSA=Open Borders, Omar, Tlaib, the Squad. They never talk about our reasonable politics. Surely you know this.
Why do the do that? Obviously they know it works. It fires up Trumps base and turnout is the main force in these elections. All the things I talked about are things that really fire up his base. I read their comments and emails. The cultural issues are what really get them worked up -- that's true on the left as well.
So everything I wrote about are the things that really drive MAGA turnout, and yes that is why we lost. This has always been true. You can go clear back to the Haymarket Riots, or the progressive era. The far-left "revolutionary" left has always sabotaged the true Progressive left -- those of us who believe in steady progress rather than in making things worse everything can be re-build better -- their utopian dream.
Read to the end of my post above, there is no other explanation for how we lost 40% of the Dem party between '64 and '72.
With all due respect, your conclusion does not follow your premise. First, with the defund and busing comments, you don't adequately make the case that any Trump voter had that in their mind when voting for Trump. One independent voter "not trusting her" is not enough evidence, and even then, there are other reasons why they may not trust her. Namely, that she ran a campaign that did not meaningfully distinguish itself from a historically unpopular administration, and did not present a compelling narrative or an affirmative case for her presidency.
Your premise is that representatives who are further to the left are "crazy." Besides the ad hominem, do you have any justification for why centrist politics are more "reasonable"? Like I already mentioned, Biden and then Harris ran as centrists. They tacked right on issues like immigration. They didn't even make a really strong case on the cultural issues that the right is obsessed with. You seem to think that just because the right wing demonizes progressive politics that they are right, which is at best ingenuous, and at worst cowardly. The MAGA movement would have been able to campaign on cultural issues regardless of whether or not there were people on the left who believed in them. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, enjoyed tremendous success among working class voters from across the country, and would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016. Instead, the Democratic Party — and people like you — have used "revolutionary" as a slur and forced them out of the coalition, even though it is abundantly clear from the results of the 2024 election that the American people are looking for something radical, or at the very least, to shake things up. I would encourage you to broaden your perspective instead of smearing good-faith, widely popular policies as "crazy."
What is your solution? That Black Americans sit back and accept the unfair treatment that they receive in this country? That trans Americans sit back as they are ostracized and brutalized? Based on the logic you present in the last paragraph, you would say that we should not have passed the Civil Rights Act because it would have caused Republicans to latch onto racial grievances in order to mobilize suburban white people (or is that not the explanation you ask for?), which is a repulsive point of view. You are mistaken, and I do not believe that you are remotely progressive — because incrementalist liberalism is literally the politics of the establishment Democratic Party since Bill Clinton. And guess what? It lost in 2016 under Hillary Clinton, and it lost again in 2024 under Biden and Harris.
I encourage you to look for figures and analysis that do not already confirm the perspective that you are clinging to, because like I mentioned, the conclusions that you present are arising from faulty premises. The results of this election fly in the face of what you appear to believe, unfortunately. You are more than welcome to join the true progressive, left-wing economic populist campaign that will be necessary — is our ONLY chance — to ever defeat the MAGA right.
I think the author overstates the case, as he overstates the magnitude of the vote. We still live in a very closely divided society, as Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin convincingly argue, and while Trump won enough votes to have a majority, it is not anything close to a large majority, leaving a quite substantial minority who I am sure mostly share Rauch's moral or liberal or other good beliefs; I know I do.
This was not an "electoral earthquake," in my view. It was a whole lot of Americans feeling like the governing and cultural elite have, for quite a while, ignored or flatly insulted them. That's how my Trump voting family feels, and I don't think they're wrong. As the only option available to them, Trump honestly felt like the much preferable choice to the Democrats, and has for more than a decade. They are not cretins or deplorable or garbage or nonentities; just Americans who aren't on board with the current Democrats.
And to disagree with Rauch, Kamala Harris did not run a very good campaign. Rauch is right that the party consolidated behind her for pragmatic reasons, and I had hopes for her I've never felt before for her luck in California politics. Maybe she'd matured as a politician, I thought. I didn't see it. She isn't a good speaker off script as she proved time and again, and she couldn't answer even the most obvious questions it was certain interviewers would ask her. That's not mature politics, that's ineptitude. And it showed.
While Trump is definitely continuing his pathology of breaking any norms that come his way, the moral and humane case against him remains strong and in the minds of, I think, most of us who voted against him. I don't feel any more marginalized by his small majority than I did when he eked out his previous win. The minority I belong to isn't in any margins, it's still pretty firmly grounded in the mainstream, and that's how I intend to deal with whatever comes from Trump this time around.
While this election brought these issues home to many, those of us in the civic education space have been looking at the decline in value and perceived importance of democracy for awhile now. Satisfaction overall is also decreasing among wealthy nations, often linked to the question of what does democracy deliver? or does it even work? Although these articles give us broad data, educators have noticed it with their students and talk about it all the time:
So the automatic authority of the idea of democracy was already in decline before Trump came on the scene. Civic education has wanted to take this up, but it is under siege in many parts of the country, limited in scope to narrow curricula that has no significant content that engages youth in anything they care about. And in truth, for most of their young lives they have generally seen dysfunction and/or stasis in Congress or at the state level. Think about some of the issues young people have taken up, like commonsense gun control following school shootings. Nada. So the brand is much tarnished in their eyes.
A request to other readers or the Substack authors. To your knowledge is there a corresponding article after the 2020 elections from the then losing side?
Something to the effect of:
"[T]hose who have stood firm against Biden and the Democrats will feel even more pressure to give way or stand down. Some will lack the energy to keep insisting that Biden is not normal; others will conclude that criticizing Biden 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."
I would be surprised if there was. Elections are won and lost, there are no permanent winners or durable coalitions, majorities are fickle, sh*t happens.
I mean that, this essay was a genuinely assiduous effort at an intelligent response to Trump’s triumph.
But it fails. It fails not because liberal democracy was voted down, but because Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the modern/postmodern “progressive” Left in America simply do not represent liberal democracy, as the term has always been understood.
The majoritarianism under discussion, de Tocqueville and the rest was ironic at best because the whole point of distinguishing liberal democracy from straight democracy was precisely that in a liberal democracy the majority does not get to vote away the basic rights of the minority.
The whole thrust of the essay seems to be a fear of precisely that, that Trump and his minions will warp America into something unrecognizable. And maybe they will, that’s not a concern I’m free of myself.
But where were you, I might ask the author, when innocent Catholic nuns were repeatedly threatened with fines and prison by Obama and his AG Eric Holder for simply declining to be complicit in abortion? When those on the Left started putting the phrase religious liberty in scare quotes? When President Obama and Secretary Clinton defined First Amendment Free Exercise down to “freedom of worship” something done inside your head, a freedom enjoyed even by those in a Lao Gai Chinese gulag ?
And what about abortion? True, Trump has significantly scaled back his opposition, but all the baby-killing organizations vote Democratic and support the DNC every cycle.
Dismemberment, beheading of helpless infants represents the moral high ground from which you’d look down on the sea of MAGA hats? Really?
No, it’s only when American “liberals” cease to be illiberal, and begin to affirm unalienable rights to Life and Liberty can they plausibly represent themselves as a credible alternative to the deeply flawed Republicans
"We also lost the standing to claim that our values represent the moral mainstream." How far you have traveled from Kindly Inquisitors, a second-rate commie trying desperately to cling to the global statist power structure that gave you cover. Trump voters are capable of seeing through the nonsense, Trump's included. Maybe you could do something useful and advocate for election audits. Joe Biden didn't get 81 million true votes. Trump was more popular than Reagan II and barely squeaked it out. The lies you and the rest of the swamp are telling could be coming to an end. Come clean.
Trump is a result as much as a cause. It's not just the right that has forgotten too much Tocqueville. The left through its unifocus on identitarian nonsense has ripped lots of the bindings of the citizenry apart. No better indication:
Yep. there is now an excellent moral argument to be made that if Democrats want to run against Trump's character, they should ONLY run against his character... that they are pretty much obligated to agree with every actual coherent, sane, plausible, legal policy he has... it's only the illegal stuff and his own bad character they can afford to have a problem with anymore.
Honestly, even before the election, there was a decent argument that if they really thought he was that bad, they should have been doing that already... Spend the entire election saying that they promised to give every compromise policy platform they could, they heard the national concerns, they agree with the national concerns, and in the interest of unity, and would knife their own left wing in the front on national tv, but please, the country has to not pick trump in return.
Trump won because people voted, supposedly, on issues and not character. That was the cardinal error. Policies can be changed but character can’t, and what people don’t seem to realize is that bad character in a leader will lead to bad policies down the road anyway.
Comments like yours are hypocritical and ridiculous, and show how two faced politics is. Character is never an issue in politics until people pretend it's one. Which aspects of Biden's character did you personally like? Harris's? They're proven liars as well and they were obviously just puppets for a larger machine that was pulling the strings.
I would wager that a solid majority of those who voted for Donald had no clue about any of the things that reflect negatively on him. That information does not permeate the reality that’s been created for them by their media diet and their churches.
The voters who outnumbered each sides voters are the ones who decided to sit this one out. And if we are going to turn the ship around somehow those are the people we are going to have to reach. Why are they disengaged? What are their dreams, needs, fears, realities? It is going to be painful to watch the damage that’s about to be inflicted on so many because the GOP has not been good at governing for a very long time. With any luck(and I type this with bile in my throat), they will screw things up so catastrophically that they’re madness will be shown for what it is once and for all and the naked emperor will be left with nowhere to hide.
Biden has been obviously, seriously cognitively impaired throughout his entire term, and the media quite literally hid it from the world. The emperor's clothes were burned a long time ago.
This is why his handlers won't allow him to go unscripted or answer questions. Just look at how he's willing to answer questions and his handlers disallow it. The president agrees to answer questions and his crew won't allow it. This is elder abuse at best, and a shadow government controlling Biden at worst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgniICwIGgQ
There is a sense in which this is true, but, ironically, the best course of action, personal and political is to treat the election as just a loss of a political argument. _Some_ ,especially some politicians, hold truly illiberal and anti-democratic values, but we should not overinterpret this as applying to all or even necessarily very many Trump voters. And it is better to address them as having what we think is a mistaken "model" of how basically shared values get cashed out into policy.
Absolutely correct.
But id like you to say that to the women who'll need healthcare in certain states,undocumented immigrants, protected and endangered species, researchers from NOAA.....farmers who'll lose their markets...
It's reality, but you're so clueless and self absorbed about the consequences to others in your prescriptive solutions.
"Seize the moral high ground"? One big motivation for many Trump voters was their perception that as far as they could see, they saw only moral low ground--the long string of lies about Biden's decline, how Biden was dumped without competition for replacement, the giveaways to favored constituents, the shameless contradictions of past position, media intimidation, the 51 intelligence officers assuring that the Hunter laptop was not real, and on and on. Voters saw a career politician vs a career businessman-entertainer. The polls showed that they overwhelmingly disliked the character of both candidates and the inside maneuvering of their respective parties. Starving for political reform, the decisive voters chose change from the outsider not the insider.
Would that the parties and their operatives climb for the moral high ground. They make great verbal claims on that high ground, but they party on in the lowlands.
Even if everything that you think about the Biden administration were 100% correct, voting for someone manifestly and openly corrupt won’t fix the problem, it’ll make it worse. I simply don’t understand this logic and it smacks of back filling: because I wanted to vote for a moral cretin like Trump, I’ll pretend that everyone is just as bad.
Looking at the pessimistic note here I am just wondering why we here in India don't give up so easily on pursuing the liberal democratic agenda even after stunning defeats.
Is it because we are too large a population to be led by one thought?
Is it because power is not the only glue that unites India, it is something more basic like a way of thinking that need not be changed?
Or ultimately is it because we in India have an electoral system where one election is not the end of the world for five years?
Lok Sabha elections and state elections are held on different days and even years giving hope to vanquished to pick up the gauntlet again, to talk about their beliefs and ideologies and many times the vanquished are victorious in State Assemblies giving them hope and energy to continue with their beliefs.
The Modi Regine is trying to change that by advocating One Nation One Election probably guided by his dear friend Donald Trumps America but after reading this piece I think we must continue with our system of elections to keep hope alive.
Good point. If it's distributed over time, expectations over time adjust too.
What I think about the Biden-Harriss administration was not the subject of my post. The main subject is the motivation of many people to vote for Trump. Another subject was the difference in perspectives about the morality of the two sides (not even of the two candidates). Perhaps, to use your phrase, voters were voting between the "openly corrupt" and the secretly. What you read into my post instead of reading the post was your own perspective.
Well, you did say "Would that the parties and their operatives climb for the moral high ground. They make great verbal claims on that high ground, but they party on in the lowlands." - implying an equivalence between the morals of the two parties. They're not equivalent.
I believe you would like to convict me of moral equivalence. At the level of "we are all sinners" I plead guilty. However, let's take the climbing metaphor I used. If you believe that a climber starting at the base of Everest is equivalent to one starting half way up, then you have the everyone is a sinner equivalence. Same if you believe all routes to the top are just routes to the top. Both parties and their candidates chose some tactics that were the same, some different. You obviously think Harriss and Democrats had the higher ground (at whatever moral elevation it might have been). Other people who are also sane and intelligent disagreed. And I implied no choice or equivalence.
Voters chose the lesser of 2 evils and the fact that the Left were so flagrant in censoring freedom of speech, upon which all other rights were formed seemed like the most important thing to protect. If you lose certain 'lesser' rights, this can be remedied through freedom of speech. If you lost the freedom to fight for those rights, all is lost. This is how I read the election results.
It's really simple, and the Left refuse to acknowledge out of sheer partisan interests, that Trump is less corrupt than the regime that is behind Biden.
Alienation. That's why.
The moral high ground is to believe in the promise of individual rights and the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness as outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Trump champions illiberal methods (due process in particular is a favorite one to ignore), and that this many people are fine with it is absolutely disheartening.
I’ll not beat up on you for imprecision, but the American “pursuit” is not of life, liberty, happiness, rather its that we have Creator-endowed unalienable rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (in the Constitution this is rendered as a right to Property).
But even if we stipulate that Trump is illiberal, is the Democratic Party, the party of abortion and religious persecution not far, far worse in terms of violating human rights?
Claiming a fetus is the same as a person is a *religious* definition. Fetuses don't have rights.
Oh yeah, the party of the Muslim ban is definitely not into religious persecution.
And translating the Pursuit of Happiness to be specifically property is ridiculous. But since conservatives worship wealth these days it makes sense why you'd think that.
Every conservative argument boils down to not liking that the promise of America is one of a multi-racial and multi-religion state where all are treated equally.
• Okay, if you maintain that those complete, distinct, living, growing human beings as yet unborn do not have rights, let’s set this aside for a moment, so I may ask, do born people have rights? Why do you think so? Is this simply stipulation, did you just DECIDE they have rights?
• Again, I’m no fan of Trump, but there was no “Muslim ban,” there was a ban, a temporary one as I understand it, on entrants from a certain very few countries. Majority Muslim ones, to be sure, but a small percentage of the total number of such nations
• You had alluded to life liberty and happiness in both Declaration AND Constitution. Well, in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment it’s rendered Life, Liberty, Property. It is to this I was referring to
• That “all should be treated equally,” a proposition i heartily agree with by the way, is itself based upon religious, or if you prefer, metaphysical antecedent principles. This takes us back to the question of whether humans have rights. Certainly governments may grant certain rights and privileges, but these are by definition alienable, they can be revoked with a change in law or policy. Our rights are only unalienable if they originate instead in our Creator, as the Declaration affirms, and the Constitution assumes (in the Second and Ninth Amendments, human rights are treated as pre-existing, pre-political, inhering in the humanity of their possessors).
So if humans, as humans have a right to life, why would not a human an hour before birth not have the same rights as one an hour afterward? She is the same, identical entity. All that is different is her location
Somebody who has a tight grip on the GOP and the propaganda services of a very large cable network and a slew of well-funded podcasts and some major editorial pages and even pastors of evangelical churches across the land -and who already held the presidency - is not an "outsider."
And while Harris is not perfect, just as no one is perfect, the moral bankruptcy of Donald Trump is in another category altogether. Most glaring is his aggressively self-centered worldview, along with casual cruelty and total indifference to the true/false distinction. He ticks off every box in the diagnostic criteria for 2 or 3 psychiatric disorders that are characterized by extreme selfishness and lack of a conscience. Even Jeffrey Epstein - his best friend for over a decade - observed that he had no moral compass.
A modest amount of time observing how the two candidates comported themselves during their campaigns would make it pretty obvious to any fair and rational observer that Trump has serious character defects, while Harris has a normal measure of human imperfection.
Since you brought up “casual cruelty”, may I ask, does Kamala Harris or her Democratic Party support the Right to Life?
As a few observers noted, the election did not hinge on voters' judgment of character as much as it hinged on their preference of path and team. Yes, Harriss has fewer blemishes on her character or disturbing idiosyncrasies, but it may have come down to two factors.
First, the decisive voters were fed up with or disturbed by "woke" politics. Harriss certainly embraced in past and present that trend.
Second, Americans often react to social stresses--economic or cultural--by blaming government and voting for what seems like change.
The Trump campaign played on both parts of the American character and increased the vote for Trump and Congressional candidates among most voting groups except white women. Harriss could not shed her identification with inflation or woke policies and people. An example of the latter was choosing Walz as her running mate.
You implied a moral equivalency in the tone of the two campaigns - and by extension, in the two candidates.
Some have faulted Harris for running a campaign that relied too much on setting a positive agenda rather than going after Trump on his malignant psychopathology and criminality. Maybe the campaign was spooked by the claims that doing so was a direct incitement to assassination - while few people know that someone was arrested for a plot against Harris.
The Trump campaign was centered on fearmongering and demonization - with Trump sweepingly calling his opponents "vermin, scum, garbage, sick, evil ...." and saying they "hate America" and are intentionally trying to "destroy" it. "Democrats hate America" is a common theme in the GOP.
Harris didn't fall for Brett Bair's effort to bait her into insulting Trump voters. There's no way that Trump would have passed up a similar opportunity. Harris finished her campaign on an upbeat note, while Trump doubled down on malignance. The moral tone of the campaigns started at the top, and there the contrast is stark.
A part of the electorate revels in Trump’s malignance. But another factor in the equation is that he has been judged by a very different standard almost from the beginning. He can go as low as he wants and still be indulged in a way that no other politician ever has been.
Historically, liberals are always in the minority even though we have just lived through unprecedented times of that not being true. However, I voted for Trump because of the choice I was given. I consider the man a crass, belligerent, mildly racist poltroon. I think he tried to seize power with force on January 6 2020 and planned his strategy to do so long before.
Why did I vote for him? Because Harris and Democrats are just as cynically lying. Biden is mentally incapable of being president right this moment and has been so for quite some time. Democrats not only continue to lie about this but they also expect us to look past their judgment that Biden was not competent enough to run for president but also just fine to remain Commander in Chief. The election is what concerned them. Not the country.
Democrats do not care about liberalism or America. They care about their power. If that isn’t true, why allow Biden to remain uncontested? Why lie about it? Republicans are surely no different but that’s that is the problem.
Second, the system successfully thwarted Trump’s effort to seize power through force so he came back and did so peacefully and through legitimate means. That is the system working to my mind. The people wanted what he offers and rejected what Democrats offer. It wasn’t a rejection of liberalism, it was a repudiation of Democrats.
I agree that illiberal behavior should be contested when we see it and surely we shall see it in the coming administration. We would have seen it had Trump lost and we did see it these past 4 years. Given the choice of illiberal actors checked by republican government, I made my choice.
I fully agree that it was a choice between two bad options. But to choose Trump, who lies more often than he tells the truth, and as you said, tried to seize power with violence, over Democrats who failed to say that their incumbent was unfit for office fast enough, is like sending back overcooked chicken at a restaurant and choosing to eat cement instead.
Considering all the Left has done is lie, lie, lie this is the pot calling the kettle black.
Trump won because he doesn't budge and inch on his beliefs and policies and people know exactly what they're getting.
He quite literally campaigned on the same principles he campaigned on in 2016
Energy independence, secure border, stronger economy, make America great again.
The difference this time is that the first time he won, he was not prepared to win and his transition was unprepared. This time he's experienced, knows what's coming and is prepared for it. He's been preparing a transition team for months before the election.
It can NOT be stated enough, that Tulsia Gabbard and RFK aided his campaign and added legitimacy and strength to his base. If his goal is to root out corruption, there is no better political candidate to align yourself with than RFK, who has done it for a living for decades.
Exactly what we're getting is a person who has no concerns about the guarantee of rights this country was founded on. I don't care what you *think* you're getting from him, it's not worth it if it doesn't align with the very bedrock of what made this country great in the first place.
I guess I'd need to know exactly what you're talking about since Dems are just as guilty of violating American principles as Republicans (or Trump) are.
I just think the Dems at this point are much larger offenders to democracy than Trump has been, and the only reason people don't see that is because up until this election the Left had a monopoly on the mainstream.
This is the 1st election that was won despite the efforts of the mainstream media. Trump's campaign was fought in the trenches of podcasts, and through independent media.
And this is where the large disconnect is. The Dems still think the mainstream is where it's at, when in fact, it's a dinosaur on it's last breath and they haven't realized that yet.
The base that voted resoundingly for Trump ignored the mainstream.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Pretty straightforward. You don't get to restrict healthcare for women. You don't get to lock up your political opponents. You don't get to put millions of immigrants into camps for deportation. You don't get "one really violent day". You don't get to make it illegal for people to criticize you, or the Supreme Court.
Yes! Pray that intelligent people stop rolling over with the expectation that his winning a slim majority of votes means he need not be opposed for his utter immorality.
Let me ask you this:
Do you have an immigration policy to your home? Do you leave the front door open and let anyone walk in? Or do you remove illegals from your home? Asking for a friend.
Regarding 'locking up political opponents' this is a fabrication of the political Left with no substance. Trump was in office for 4 years, FOUR YEARS and did not lock up Hilary Clinton, even though she funded the Russian Collusion hoax against him.
He has never stated he was going to lock up political opponents, even though the Left has weaponized the Justice system against him.
But there certainly should be an investigation into whether or not the justice system was weaponized. I'm all for that.
Finally, regarding women's health care.
The US is the single worst country in the world for health care, and you can't blame Trump for that. Democrats have ruled the White House for the majority of the last few decades.
Why have they not reformed health care like every other Western country has?
He has never stated he was going to have "one violent day" or make it illegal to criticize him...but that is EXACTLY what the Left is trying to do with their censorship wall.
Or have you already forgotten how Biden trying to have a "ministry of truth" installed to dictate what is and isn't true? That's rich, coming from the person who censored the free speech of the American people for his own gain.
It appears now 2weeks later that the popular vote is barely a majority: 50% for Trump, 48% for Harris. This is a slim “mandate.” The danger is responding as the author describes and it is on the Republicans to show if they have any moral character left.
Explain that to the distressed undocumented immigrant and his/her family who've been for here two decades picking the produce on your plate.
Melodramatic claptrap. It seems to me that Democrats are discovering that the conservative, religious and patriarchal Hispanic men they’ve been importing ostensibly to vote for them has backfired in their faces.
Translation: he voted for Trump.
Please avoid profanities. Your point is correct. Could you please take it down and state it minus expletives.
Fair enough.
Must say that xenophobic nonsense should not be treated with a "pretty please" attitude . We have what we have now because white liberals looked the other way for far too long when it came to legalization if the undocumented.
We're both of indian origin , advanced degrees and the assumptions these xenophobic individuals make is that attacking the undocumented popn is ok with others who don't fit the profile of an undocumented immigrant, and they won't fight back.
Fair enough.
Must say that xenophobic nonsense should not be treated with a "pretty please" attitude . We have what we have now because white liberals looked the other way for far too long when it came to legalization if the undocumented.
We're both of indian origin , advanced degrees and the assumptions these xenophobic individuals make is that attacking the undocumented popn is ok with others who don't fit the profile of an undocumented immigrant, and they won't fight back.
Then I’m sure you’ll pardon me for puking all over your ill conceived justification for voting for destruction, I’m sure.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Trump campaigns openly against the very foundation and promise of what America stands for. These rights extend to all people, not just the ones you like.
Abortion is not healthcare. I’m pro choice politically but this is just a lie to put your position above moral objection, which it is not. It’s a hard issue because you have conflicting rights at play. I thought Roe should not be overturned but the states are settling it as their electorates see fit. This is in fact democracy, as opposed to rule by nine justices.
I notice that we are still trying to lock up Trump. What would you call that? This isn’t locking up your political opponent?
But you forgot some words:
“…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it ... But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Duty. If we indeed have elected a tyrant, you are duty bound to overthrow his rule. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
Why are Kamala and Biden saying to cool off and it will be OK? Didn’t they spend all summer telling us this would be our last election ever if Trump won? That he would seize power like Emperor Palpatine?
Well? Obviously they were lying as we already knew.
What abortion laws prevent is exactly healthcare. Anywhere from 10-25% of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion and some of those absolutely require medical care to prevent complications.
In certain instances women are forced to carry to term knowing the baby will die on birth.
Examples:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/02/health/florida-abortion-term-pregnancy/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/30/texas-woman-death-abortion-ban-miscarriage
Again, this is just cloaking an argument in self righteous morality. Surely abortion laws can prevent wholesale abortion while permitting situations where health is in danger to be treated as the medical emergencies they are. I would say the same for “all abortion is murder” or the ever absurd canard “except for rape and incest” as if the state could reliably determine those details within the window of a pregnancy.
Ha ha ha ha. Maybe I like cement.
It’s funny but I think the lies Democrats are continuing to tell me right now are just as egregious. Biden is clearly incapable mentally. Democrats have admitted as much by forcing him out of the race. But he can remain president because the only thing they care about is their electoral chances.
I get forcing him out of the White House is a tougher ask but I’ve heard nary a peep about it. I’m supposed to swallow this lie without objection just as I was expected to swallow the lie it was for the past 2 years until they got caught with their pants down in that debate. Everyone was surprised by Biden’s senility even though I wasn’t and I’m just sitting here on my couch.
Yeah, I don’t but it. I think Democrats knew Harris would be deeply unpopular but they were stuck so they tried to squeak by with Biden until that lie became untenable. Then, they pushed the old man out but it was too late.
The party is surely free to choose their candidate however they wish but pretending to have a primary where the serious contenders (some of whom I may well have voted for) were sidelined and then backdooring the worst candidate in recent memory was a stupid decision and quite frankly, Democrats got what they deserved. Maybe the fault is more with Biden but I really don’t care. He should have stepped aside.
Perhaps with this resounding defeat, the party will moderate itself and go back to representing its electorate instead of a bunch out of touch elites.
Trump's resounding win in 2024 is evidence that the Left may have compromised democracy to win in 2020. They certainly tried hard to lie to people about the Hunter Biden laptop story (and succeeded for a time) and they certainly lied to people about many aspects of the pandemic. BOTH of these things affected the vote in 2020.
There is NO WAY they win in 2020 with a level playing field...level meaning they allow the truth of both the laptop and the pandemic to spill into the open, unchecked.
It certainly did affect the vote because people like yourself who live in the world of conspiracy theories voted in that election. Beyond that, not so much. If I may respectfully make a suggestion, put yourself in conspiracy theory detox. Stop listening to Joe Rogan or at least listen to other voices with an open mind. It would help you process the complexity of the world. From your comments on this site, it is pretty clear that you have a mental block that prevents you from processing any argument or analysis beyond your pet peeves. There is no piece that doesn't lead to the Hunter Biden laptop. It bespeaks of an unhealthy obsession and, at this point, we have all heard you many times over and don't think we will profit from you making that point yet again. So perhaps think of of new arguments or consider just withdrawing from this site.
I want you to know that I personally don't like conflict. I also respect that this is your publication and hate having to disagree with you, but until the Left starts acknowledging it's moral errors and hypocrisy, it needs to be brought up.
I know you perceive me as this 'right wing conspiracy theorist' but that's just an unfounded ad hominem.
I'm personal friends with Bernie Sanders; long time campaign manager. I don't disclose my personal name here because it's common to attack people in real life for their beliefs these days, thanks to the Democrat's hate mongering for anyone who disagrees with them.
I was a huge Bernie fan. I watched Hilary's power hungry corruption utterly destroy Bernie's chances at the Presidency and watched as filthy money pushed her to the forefront, only to lose against Trump.
I'm a lifelong old school Liberal and have always lived by those principles of personal freedom, accountability and less government / war / corruption.
The Liberal parties of the world (not only in the USA) have left these things in the dust, exchanging these ideologies for corporate power and money. They try to sound like Liberals but act nothing like them. The WEF, led by 200 countries and 800 corporations is pushing it's values into the lives of individual citizens through these far Left governments, guided by an anti-human, anti-science ideology.
Just look at some of the things they are coming up with.
Math is racist?
Humans are bad for the planet and we need less of them?
Trees are bad for the environment?
Everything is a fabrication, an unnatural construct, much like Hilary's push in 2016, Biden's election in 2020 and Kamala's run for 2024.
Nobody wanted those to happen and yet somehow they continue to push them.
Why?
Biden was incompetent to lead from the very beginning. Everyone knew it except for the Democratic party.
Nobody wanted Kamala. Everyone knew it except for the Democratic party.
The stock market knew it. Hamas knew it. Russia knew it. And more than half of Americans knew it.
I brought up the Hunter Biden laptop repeatedly because it is a clear example of the brutal corruption within the Democratic party. The FBI, based on Biden's word suppressed the story and it all ended up being true. It's a full on conspiracy that's been proven.
The people voted because they are tired of the lies and lack of accountability. And accountability is coming just as millions of people whose lives have been destroyed by this lack of accountability have been crying for.
Musk voted for Obama.
Rogan voted for Bernie in 2020.
Tulsi was a Democrat.
RFK was a Democrat.
Rather than double down on the lunacy, and smear anyone who disagrees, maybe a little self reflection is in order on how the Democratic party got ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED in this election. I know which side of history I want to be on, and it's not on the side of a party who can't be reasoned with.
It's not a good look right now.
BTW, where did those 11 million Democrat voters that voted Biden in go? Strange that the Democratic party is so convinced they're right when 11 million less people voted for them.
This is misguided: "We need to view the election as a moral defeat." No, the election defeated the Democrat's immorality and I say that from a position far to "left" of the Democratic Party, although I've always voted Democratic.
The Democrat's moral defeat has come on slowly and has been the work of anti-Democrat left extremists. They have captured the minds of most Democrats with disinformation delivered through our "left" press.
Consider BLM
Their 3 leaders are "well-trained Marxists" who follow the teachings of "our beloved Assata Shakur" who was a leader of the Black Liberation Army in the early 1970s. Her mission was to assassinate police and Rob banks to buy guns for the revolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNayoOysBLY AssataShakur.org/message.htm
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/the-untold-story-behind-new-yorks-most-brutal-cop-killing-117207/
20 million Democrats followed them on self-righteous marches that resulted in an additional 5,000 Black Lives lost to criminals when they discouraged the police from fighting crime proactively.
[ https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/4229348-the-dismal-tradeoff-on-police-violence-in-america/ This pro-BLM study found that BEFORE 2020, BLM marches resulted in 3000 additional murders with only half a million marchers. And there is plenty of other evidence.]
All of this was based on completely idiotic statistical analysis published in the Washington Post starting in 2015 and continuing. (I took a field in stats when getting my econ PhD at UC Berkeley, and would be happy to document this and other claims for the UnPopulist).
In fact, if the police were to police the Black community as they police the White community in proportion to the murder rate (instead of Under-Policing violent crime in Black Communities) they would kill several times more Blacks than they do. (And they would like to reduce the murder rate to something near the non-Black murder rate.) I'm not condoning their violence, I'm just saying the Post's racial-Police-killings story is utter nonsense.
There are many other such examples of Democrats being misled into tremendously immoral behavior while condemning the working class for their immorality. And, Yes, the working class knows that the police save lives and defunding them is massively murderous.
It's time for Persuasion and The UnPopulist to learn some math, do some research into many areas, and explain the moral crimes being invited by our extreme left. They are the ones responsible for Trump. And they did this once before between 1964 and 1972 when they cut the Democratic vote by 40% in 8 years. As McGovern admitted, 20 million people left the Dems. We had 67% of the working class in 1964 and 30% in 1972. And, No, that was not due to civil rights. We got the 67% four months After LBJ passed the civil rights bill and after it had made headlines for a year. It was radical left violence and anti-Americanism that lost the working class, much like today. Then as now, the working class defeated extreme far-left immorality.
Can you make the case that anything you've just typed above actually had an impact on the 2024 election? Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor whose candidacy was rejected by the Black Lives Matter movement, and she was not a proponent of defunding the police. I'm having trouble understanding your claim that this election was a referendum on what you call "extreme far-left immorality." Kamala Harris was just as much a representative of the Democratic neoliberal establishment as Joe Biden, and that's what lost against Trump.
That's a fair question. Kamala did several interviews that supported "Defunding." Search this CNN headline "Kamala Harris praised ‘defund the police’ movement in June 2020 radio interview." No I don't think she buys that. But she lied through her teeth about Biden and busing during the primary debates. I live in Berkeley I know that history and Biden's. The one truly independent voter I know does not trust her at all. But here's big picture answer.
If you check the right-wing press, they always make the most of the craziest Dem representatives, AOC, Sanders, DSA=Open Borders, Omar, Tlaib, the Squad. They never talk about our reasonable politics. Surely you know this.
Why do the do that? Obviously they know it works. It fires up Trumps base and turnout is the main force in these elections. All the things I talked about are things that really fire up his base. I read their comments and emails. The cultural issues are what really get them worked up -- that's true on the left as well.
So everything I wrote about are the things that really drive MAGA turnout, and yes that is why we lost. This has always been true. You can go clear back to the Haymarket Riots, or the progressive era. The far-left "revolutionary" left has always sabotaged the true Progressive left -- those of us who believe in steady progress rather than in making things worse everything can be re-build better -- their utopian dream.
Read to the end of my post above, there is no other explanation for how we lost 40% of the Dem party between '64 and '72.
With all due respect, your conclusion does not follow your premise. First, with the defund and busing comments, you don't adequately make the case that any Trump voter had that in their mind when voting for Trump. One independent voter "not trusting her" is not enough evidence, and even then, there are other reasons why they may not trust her. Namely, that she ran a campaign that did not meaningfully distinguish itself from a historically unpopular administration, and did not present a compelling narrative or an affirmative case for her presidency.
Your premise is that representatives who are further to the left are "crazy." Besides the ad hominem, do you have any justification for why centrist politics are more "reasonable"? Like I already mentioned, Biden and then Harris ran as centrists. They tacked right on issues like immigration. They didn't even make a really strong case on the cultural issues that the right is obsessed with. You seem to think that just because the right wing demonizes progressive politics that they are right, which is at best ingenuous, and at worst cowardly. The MAGA movement would have been able to campaign on cultural issues regardless of whether or not there were people on the left who believed in them. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, enjoyed tremendous success among working class voters from across the country, and would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016. Instead, the Democratic Party — and people like you — have used "revolutionary" as a slur and forced them out of the coalition, even though it is abundantly clear from the results of the 2024 election that the American people are looking for something radical, or at the very least, to shake things up. I would encourage you to broaden your perspective instead of smearing good-faith, widely popular policies as "crazy."
What is your solution? That Black Americans sit back and accept the unfair treatment that they receive in this country? That trans Americans sit back as they are ostracized and brutalized? Based on the logic you present in the last paragraph, you would say that we should not have passed the Civil Rights Act because it would have caused Republicans to latch onto racial grievances in order to mobilize suburban white people (or is that not the explanation you ask for?), which is a repulsive point of view. You are mistaken, and I do not believe that you are remotely progressive — because incrementalist liberalism is literally the politics of the establishment Democratic Party since Bill Clinton. And guess what? It lost in 2016 under Hillary Clinton, and it lost again in 2024 under Biden and Harris.
I encourage you to look for figures and analysis that do not already confirm the perspective that you are clinging to, because like I mentioned, the conclusions that you present are arising from faulty premises. The results of this election fly in the face of what you appear to believe, unfortunately. You are more than welcome to join the true progressive, left-wing economic populist campaign that will be necessary — is our ONLY chance — to ever defeat the MAGA right.
I think the author overstates the case, as he overstates the magnitude of the vote. We still live in a very closely divided society, as Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin convincingly argue, and while Trump won enough votes to have a majority, it is not anything close to a large majority, leaving a quite substantial minority who I am sure mostly share Rauch's moral or liberal or other good beliefs; I know I do.
This was not an "electoral earthquake," in my view. It was a whole lot of Americans feeling like the governing and cultural elite have, for quite a while, ignored or flatly insulted them. That's how my Trump voting family feels, and I don't think they're wrong. As the only option available to them, Trump honestly felt like the much preferable choice to the Democrats, and has for more than a decade. They are not cretins or deplorable or garbage or nonentities; just Americans who aren't on board with the current Democrats.
And to disagree with Rauch, Kamala Harris did not run a very good campaign. Rauch is right that the party consolidated behind her for pragmatic reasons, and I had hopes for her I've never felt before for her luck in California politics. Maybe she'd matured as a politician, I thought. I didn't see it. She isn't a good speaker off script as she proved time and again, and she couldn't answer even the most obvious questions it was certain interviewers would ask her. That's not mature politics, that's ineptitude. And it showed.
While Trump is definitely continuing his pathology of breaking any norms that come his way, the moral and humane case against him remains strong and in the minds of, I think, most of us who voted against him. I don't feel any more marginalized by his small majority than I did when he eked out his previous win. The minority I belong to isn't in any margins, it's still pretty firmly grounded in the mainstream, and that's how I intend to deal with whatever comes from Trump this time around.
While this election brought these issues home to many, those of us in the civic education space have been looking at the decline in value and perceived importance of democracy for awhile now. Satisfaction overall is also decreasing among wealthy nations, often linked to the question of what does democracy deliver? or does it even work? Although these articles give us broad data, educators have noticed it with their students and talk about it all the time:
• https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/18/satisfaction-with-democracy-has-declined-in-recent-years-in-high-income-nations/
• https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/87/3/719/7275177
So the automatic authority of the idea of democracy was already in decline before Trump came on the scene. Civic education has wanted to take this up, but it is under siege in many parts of the country, limited in scope to narrow curricula that has no significant content that engages youth in anything they care about. And in truth, for most of their young lives they have generally seen dysfunction and/or stasis in Congress or at the state level. Think about some of the issues young people have taken up, like commonsense gun control following school shootings. Nada. So the brand is much tarnished in their eyes.
I'm not happy about this, btw.
The Immoral Majority would be a good name for this. Oh well.
Here comes fascism?
A request to other readers or the Substack authors. To your knowledge is there a corresponding article after the 2020 elections from the then losing side?
Something to the effect of:
"[T]hose who have stood firm against Biden and the Democrats will feel even more pressure to give way or stand down. Some will lack the energy to keep insisting that Biden is not normal; others will conclude that criticizing Biden 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."
I would be surprised if there was. Elections are won and lost, there are no permanent winners or durable coalitions, majorities are fickle, sh*t happens.
The biblical prophets were killed.
Spoiler alert!
Nice try!
I mean that, this essay was a genuinely assiduous effort at an intelligent response to Trump’s triumph.
But it fails. It fails not because liberal democracy was voted down, but because Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the modern/postmodern “progressive” Left in America simply do not represent liberal democracy, as the term has always been understood.
The majoritarianism under discussion, de Tocqueville and the rest was ironic at best because the whole point of distinguishing liberal democracy from straight democracy was precisely that in a liberal democracy the majority does not get to vote away the basic rights of the minority.
The whole thrust of the essay seems to be a fear of precisely that, that Trump and his minions will warp America into something unrecognizable. And maybe they will, that’s not a concern I’m free of myself.
But where were you, I might ask the author, when innocent Catholic nuns were repeatedly threatened with fines and prison by Obama and his AG Eric Holder for simply declining to be complicit in abortion? When those on the Left started putting the phrase religious liberty in scare quotes? When President Obama and Secretary Clinton defined First Amendment Free Exercise down to “freedom of worship” something done inside your head, a freedom enjoyed even by those in a Lao Gai Chinese gulag ?
And what about abortion? True, Trump has significantly scaled back his opposition, but all the baby-killing organizations vote Democratic and support the DNC every cycle.
Dismemberment, beheading of helpless infants represents the moral high ground from which you’d look down on the sea of MAGA hats? Really?
No, it’s only when American “liberals” cease to be illiberal, and begin to affirm unalienable rights to Life and Liberty can they plausibly represent themselves as a credible alternative to the deeply flawed Republicans
"We also lost the standing to claim that our values represent the moral mainstream." How far you have traveled from Kindly Inquisitors, a second-rate commie trying desperately to cling to the global statist power structure that gave you cover. Trump voters are capable of seeing through the nonsense, Trump's included. Maybe you could do something useful and advocate for election audits. Joe Biden didn't get 81 million true votes. Trump was more popular than Reagan II and barely squeaked it out. The lies you and the rest of the swamp are telling could be coming to an end. Come clean.
Trump is a result as much as a cause. It's not just the right that has forgotten too much Tocqueville. The left through its unifocus on identitarian nonsense has ripped lots of the bindings of the citizenry apart. No better indication:
"In the early 1980s, 67 percent of high-school seniors agreed that the U.S. system was the best. By 2022, only 27 percent did. Thus, only one out of four American teens now agrees that their country is exceptional." - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/youth-democracy-united-states-unique/680344/
Hopefully we find the way back.
Yep. there is now an excellent moral argument to be made that if Democrats want to run against Trump's character, they should ONLY run against his character... that they are pretty much obligated to agree with every actual coherent, sane, plausible, legal policy he has... it's only the illegal stuff and his own bad character they can afford to have a problem with anymore.
Honestly, even before the election, there was a decent argument that if they really thought he was that bad, they should have been doing that already... Spend the entire election saying that they promised to give every compromise policy platform they could, they heard the national concerns, they agree with the national concerns, and in the interest of unity, and would knife their own left wing in the front on national tv, but please, the country has to not pick trump in return.