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.
As a conservative independent I put all my eggs in the Democrat's basket KNOWING that there was a 50/50 chance that the effort might end in failure. Well, our eggs got smashed. So while I was disappointed I was not surprised by the results
However don't forget that Hillary Clinton did get more than 50% of the popular vote in 2016. Trump won the Electoral College because of 77,000 votes spread across three states.
Remember that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016 and that Joe Biden BARELY won the Electoral College by 50,000 votes spread across 3 states in 2020.
Also more people voted for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020. And apparently fewer voters went for Harris as went for Biden.
When the counting is over it will be interesting to see what the margin was in the swing states but it looks like Trump won most of those by significant margins so that Harris was never even close to an Electoral College win.
All this tells me there is something other than racism and misogyny going on here. Obviously it would be nice to dismiss Trump's victory to the low moral character of his supporters but to do so is to fail to really take a deep look at ourselves.
Perhaps the Democratic brand has become so toxic to many Americans that even identifying as a Democrat is too great an obstacle to overcome for enough people regardless of how good the candidate is or reasonable and even popular his or her policies might poll.
As to Trumps criminality I think the majority of Americans see it as merely bad publicity and not serious crime. Our sense of right and wrong has been so dumbed down we see someone like Trump as falling within the norms of human normal frailty.
They believe he may have paid off Stormy Daniels but they don't believe he raped anyone. His claim of grabbing women by the pussy just locker room talk. To many the January 6 events were just a protest that got out of hand and not a serious attempt to derail the election. They believe that the Trump prosecutions are essentially partisan and a legal overreaction to what they see as minor offences exaggerated by the media. It isn't that they believe he hasn't done wrong but that it didn't arise to the level of impeachment or imprisonment. All of which WE know is ridiculous but in our degenerate society amounts to nothing much to get worked up about.
The irony here is that he says because he won so "bigly" this time is proof positive the Democrats stole the election in 2020. This will soon become the official Republican narrative vindicating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
This is indeed depressing. And still built on Trump biggest success: he lies so well! He mastered repetition of lies that becomes accepted as “must be true” He mastered accusing your opponent of doing what you are doing so they don’t even notice it was you who stole the pie. Moral degeneracy: that the repeated destruction of norms and lack of accountability are just… normal.
By accepting and bragging about Liz Cheney's endorsement, Harris moved not to the "center" but to a greater accommodation with authoritarian figures. This didn't reassure anyone who thought she was too close to the authoritarian left. When she told people like me Cheney was giving us "permission" to vote for her, I was highly insulted.
Trump didn't suggest that any opponent face a firing squad, and his rambling on Arnold Palmer's genitalia was minor compared to his policy proposals (e.g., his intent to be a dictator for a day). The repetition of false information and looking for a new minor detail to jump on each day contributed to distrust of the media and hence to Trump's win.
Early in the 2015-16 campaign, I concluded that Trump was too morally bankrupt for me to vote for him, regardless of who his opponent was, or what raft of policies he proposed. And he showed ignorance and stupidity on top of it. There was no chance he would carry out his responsibilities with integrity or wisdom, or with genuine concern for the well-being of the American people.
It was dismaying to see most of the conservative influencers who once said "character matters" decide that it really doesn't, or redefine it as "policies I like," and then devote themselves to defending every Trumpian outrage while heaping scorn on former allies who did not readjust their moral compasses to accommodate Trump.
They cultivated an inverse morality, anchored in the will of a psychopath who lacks a conscience. Anyone who crossed him must be accounted on the side of evil and treachery, while he is clothed in righteousness. Even when he clearly committed serious crimes, he must be protected - and all the opprobrium must fall on anyone who tries to hold him to account. The whole justice system must be condemned as "corrupt" before any concession is made to the proposition that Trump is the problem.
Today, my moral revulsion against Trump is deeper than ever. Making it worse is knowing that so many Americans, including people I formerly admired, are not offended by his amorality but instead portray it as a special asset. I do think a significant portion of Trump voters aren't aware of the extent of his outrages, because they don't pay attention or they're in a MAGA media cocoon. But some well-educated people certainly know a lot of it - and they still wanted him back in the White House.
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.
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.
Trump won for one reason, and one reason alone and NOBODY on the media is talking about it:
Trump won because the Democrats pushed their agenda too hard, and were caught lying to the public through the pandemic (and the Hunter Biden laptop story).
The American people no longer trust the Democratic party to be honest and the only option to stop them was Trump.
The fact that nobody on the media will discuss this validates the fact that this is why Trump won.
The Left in every country in the world (not just in the US) pushed for ILLEGAL mandates, to force an experimental drug into the veins of unwilling people, a drug that was not as safe OR as effective as they were told it was going to be, to keep people locked down against their will, to force people to shut down their businesses against their will, and created a disaster in mental health, the development of children and destroyed the economy as fallout.
And they did it by lying and coercing lies through the media.
Get a grip, people. Even a child could see this coming.
What the HELL did everyone think was going to happen. Of course people were going to be pissed and vote those governments out at their very soonest opportunity.
And it's happening in nearly every Western democracy around the globe.
But yeah, let's blame it on the fact that Harris only had 100 days to campaign. I can't laugh loud enough.
What the Left has to do now is prove it's not going to lie and cheat again next time, and good luck with that one.
No one is talking about? Thats all that the entire right wing ecosystem talks about. Give us a break from your anti vax and other crack pottery. Isn’t Joe Rogan a better place for you?
Typical. Nobody ever wants to talk about the elephant in the room (COVID). Lady, what about the COVID regime was 'liberal', in your view? Because the fact that you don't want to talk about it ever shows to me that you bought into using force to ensure people couldn't open their businesses, that people couldn't assemble freely (except for BLM because COVID doesn't impact BLM protesters, apparently).
How is that nonsense liberalism? You guys are clearly hypocrites who would have gladly sent people to gulags simply for refusing to take the jabajabadingdong. It was a gross violation of everything liberalism SHOULD stand for, but how dare we talk about it?
Nobody on the LEFT is talking about it. They are covering it up because that's the entire reason they lost the trust of the average American.
The Left pushed TOO hard and lost the trust of the public.
Joe Rogan and Musk did more for America than any other single person outside of politics, keeping the discussion uncensored and transparent and anyone who loves freedom of speech (certainly not today's 'Liberals') have Joe Rogan to thank for it.
You know NOTHING about me or what I know, and yet you're making ad hominem attacks.
You're going to need to state what exactly you're talking about, but I'll give you a few examples of what I know.
The mainstream, under the direction of the Biden administration suppressed many truths and pushed many lies during the pandemic because they were inconvenient to the narrative and this has been proven. It's a fact of court documentation.
For example, the objections and posts of experts like Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford (professor of medicine and economics) and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford (infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology) were de-platformed and shut down from the public discussion.
Why would they do this to experts who clearly knew what they were talking about?
The discussion around Ivermectin was censored during the pandemic. That discussion as now been uncensored by court order and the FDA was ordered to remove it's messaging against IVM.
There is so much that the public is not aware of, and they are unaware because the 'gatekeepers' to the truth were the same people who were inconvenienced by the truth.
So where is my 'conspiracy' just a theory? I'll wait...
It's a full blown conspiracy, with a paper trial and facts to prove it, and the last 4 years have been spent uncovering it. The conspiracy is now out in the open.
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 voted for neither. I disliked both. But Trump won despite 1) the republican never Trumpers and 2) the hold your nose Harris voters.
What scares me about the American left is that Biden campaigned on a quiet 4 years and then joined the union picket lines (ie ruled far to the left). It was therefore completely impossible to believe the Harris move to the center.
So unions are the "far left"??? Unions protect people in the working class. The working class that Trump claims to support, but (of course) really doesn't. Yikes.
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.
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.
As a conservative independent I put all my eggs in the Democrat's basket KNOWING that there was a 50/50 chance that the effort might end in failure. Well, our eggs got smashed. So while I was disappointed I was not surprised by the results
However don't forget that Hillary Clinton did get more than 50% of the popular vote in 2016. Trump won the Electoral College because of 77,000 votes spread across three states.
Remember that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016 and that Joe Biden BARELY won the Electoral College by 50,000 votes spread across 3 states in 2020.
Also more people voted for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020. And apparently fewer voters went for Harris as went for Biden.
When the counting is over it will be interesting to see what the margin was in the swing states but it looks like Trump won most of those by significant margins so that Harris was never even close to an Electoral College win.
All this tells me there is something other than racism and misogyny going on here. Obviously it would be nice to dismiss Trump's victory to the low moral character of his supporters but to do so is to fail to really take a deep look at ourselves.
Perhaps the Democratic brand has become so toxic to many Americans that even identifying as a Democrat is too great an obstacle to overcome for enough people regardless of how good the candidate is or reasonable and even popular his or her policies might poll.
As to Trumps criminality I think the majority of Americans see it as merely bad publicity and not serious crime. Our sense of right and wrong has been so dumbed down we see someone like Trump as falling within the norms of human normal frailty.
They believe he may have paid off Stormy Daniels but they don't believe he raped anyone. His claim of grabbing women by the pussy just locker room talk. To many the January 6 events were just a protest that got out of hand and not a serious attempt to derail the election. They believe that the Trump prosecutions are essentially partisan and a legal overreaction to what they see as minor offences exaggerated by the media. It isn't that they believe he hasn't done wrong but that it didn't arise to the level of impeachment or imprisonment. All of which WE know is ridiculous but in our degenerate society amounts to nothing much to get worked up about.
The irony here is that he says because he won so "bigly" this time is proof positive the Democrats stole the election in 2020. This will soon become the official Republican narrative vindicating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
This is indeed depressing. And still built on Trump biggest success: he lies so well! He mastered repetition of lies that becomes accepted as “must be true” He mastered accusing your opponent of doing what you are doing so they don’t even notice it was you who stole the pie. Moral degeneracy: that the repeated destruction of norms and lack of accountability are just… normal.
By accepting and bragging about Liz Cheney's endorsement, Harris moved not to the "center" but to a greater accommodation with authoritarian figures. This didn't reassure anyone who thought she was too close to the authoritarian left. When she told people like me Cheney was giving us "permission" to vote for her, I was highly insulted.
Trump didn't suggest that any opponent face a firing squad, and his rambling on Arnold Palmer's genitalia was minor compared to his policy proposals (e.g., his intent to be a dictator for a day). The repetition of false information and looking for a new minor detail to jump on each day contributed to distrust of the media and hence to Trump's win.
Early in the 2015-16 campaign, I concluded that Trump was too morally bankrupt for me to vote for him, regardless of who his opponent was, or what raft of policies he proposed. And he showed ignorance and stupidity on top of it. There was no chance he would carry out his responsibilities with integrity or wisdom, or with genuine concern for the well-being of the American people.
It was dismaying to see most of the conservative influencers who once said "character matters" decide that it really doesn't, or redefine it as "policies I like," and then devote themselves to defending every Trumpian outrage while heaping scorn on former allies who did not readjust their moral compasses to accommodate Trump.
They cultivated an inverse morality, anchored in the will of a psychopath who lacks a conscience. Anyone who crossed him must be accounted on the side of evil and treachery, while he is clothed in righteousness. Even when he clearly committed serious crimes, he must be protected - and all the opprobrium must fall on anyone who tries to hold him to account. The whole justice system must be condemned as "corrupt" before any concession is made to the proposition that Trump is the problem.
Today, my moral revulsion against Trump is deeper than ever. Making it worse is knowing that so many Americans, including people I formerly admired, are not offended by his amorality but instead portray it as a special asset. I do think a significant portion of Trump voters aren't aware of the extent of his outrages, because they don't pay attention or they're in a MAGA media cocoon. But some well-educated people certainly know a lot of it - and they still wanted him back in the White House.
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.
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.
Trump won for one reason, and one reason alone and NOBODY on the media is talking about it:
Trump won because the Democrats pushed their agenda too hard, and were caught lying to the public through the pandemic (and the Hunter Biden laptop story).
The American people no longer trust the Democratic party to be honest and the only option to stop them was Trump.
The fact that nobody on the media will discuss this validates the fact that this is why Trump won.
The Left in every country in the world (not just in the US) pushed for ILLEGAL mandates, to force an experimental drug into the veins of unwilling people, a drug that was not as safe OR as effective as they were told it was going to be, to keep people locked down against their will, to force people to shut down their businesses against their will, and created a disaster in mental health, the development of children and destroyed the economy as fallout.
And they did it by lying and coercing lies through the media.
Get a grip, people. Even a child could see this coming.
What the HELL did everyone think was going to happen. Of course people were going to be pissed and vote those governments out at their very soonest opportunity.
And it's happening in nearly every Western democracy around the globe.
But yeah, let's blame it on the fact that Harris only had 100 days to campaign. I can't laugh loud enough.
What the Left has to do now is prove it's not going to lie and cheat again next time, and good luck with that one.
No one is talking about? Thats all that the entire right wing ecosystem talks about. Give us a break from your anti vax and other crack pottery. Isn’t Joe Rogan a better place for you?
Typical. Nobody ever wants to talk about the elephant in the room (COVID). Lady, what about the COVID regime was 'liberal', in your view? Because the fact that you don't want to talk about it ever shows to me that you bought into using force to ensure people couldn't open their businesses, that people couldn't assemble freely (except for BLM because COVID doesn't impact BLM protesters, apparently).
How is that nonsense liberalism? You guys are clearly hypocrites who would have gladly sent people to gulags simply for refusing to take the jabajabadingdong. It was a gross violation of everything liberalism SHOULD stand for, but how dare we talk about it?
You guys are nuts.
Nobody on the LEFT is talking about it. They are covering it up because that's the entire reason they lost the trust of the average American.
The Left pushed TOO hard and lost the trust of the public.
Joe Rogan and Musk did more for America than any other single person outside of politics, keeping the discussion uncensored and transparent and anyone who loves freedom of speech (certainly not today's 'Liberals') have Joe Rogan to thank for it.
Conspiracy theories make sense when you don't take the time to educate yourself.
"question everything.... except for the things I don't question"
You know NOTHING about me or what I know, and yet you're making ad hominem attacks.
You're going to need to state what exactly you're talking about, but I'll give you a few examples of what I know.
The mainstream, under the direction of the Biden administration suppressed many truths and pushed many lies during the pandemic because they were inconvenient to the narrative and this has been proven. It's a fact of court documentation.
For example, the objections and posts of experts like Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford (professor of medicine and economics) and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford (infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology) were de-platformed and shut down from the public discussion.
Why would they do this to experts who clearly knew what they were talking about?
The discussion around Ivermectin was censored during the pandemic. That discussion as now been uncensored by court order and the FDA was ordered to remove it's messaging against IVM.
There is so much that the public is not aware of, and they are unaware because the 'gatekeepers' to the truth were the same people who were inconvenienced by the truth.
So where is my 'conspiracy' just a theory? I'll wait...
Where is the conspiracy 'theory'?
It's a full blown conspiracy, with a paper trial and facts to prove it, and the last 4 years have been spent uncovering it. The conspiracy is now out in the open.
Where exactly is the theory?
Lol, "it's a conspiracy without a theory". You know better than the entire medical field because reasons.
See my post above.
:-)
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.
I voted for neither. I disliked both. But Trump won despite 1) the republican never Trumpers and 2) the hold your nose Harris voters.
What scares me about the American left is that Biden campaigned on a quiet 4 years and then joined the union picket lines (ie ruled far to the left). It was therefore completely impossible to believe the Harris move to the center.
The idea that a person should have a 40 hour work week and that you should be compensated fairly for your work, real far left ideas.
So unions are the "far left"??? Unions protect people in the working class. The working class that Trump claims to support, but (of course) really doesn't. Yikes.
He was the first president in history to take sides on a union strike.
Indeed, this time around, some unions found 60% of their membership supporting Trump, so they made the wise decision not to endorse a candidate.
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.