I Keep Promising Myself I’m Through With This

But before I do:

Another explanation is that Democrats have become the party of college-educated voters exclusively, and shed working-class voters, especially working-class voters of color. There is some truth to this, especially over the long term. But this explanation is also flawed. Trump did better consistently with every demographic almost everywhere in the country, including college-educated white people and women. While these numbers were more pronounced with young voters, Latinos and men, it was only slight. Most highly educated areas that had swung consistently against Republicans in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 moved back toward Trump this year. His victory was not with any one demographic. It was total.

So Democrats should be more like Republicans? Still?

One of the most common centrist takes has been: Democrats have become too progressive and “woke” on social issues and obsessed with identity politics, and Democratic staffers and consultants live in a bubble and speak in alienating ways that have made them seem radical and off-putting to the median voter. The solution is a relentless focus on bread-and-butter issues and moderating, mostly ignoring culture war issues, besides abortion, and aggressively playing up moderate and bipartisan bona fides. 

It seems quite likely this narrative will win out among Democrats. It has already been expressed by elected officials and influential Democratic pundits. The key problem with this narrative is that while it may have had merit in 2020 or 2022, Democrats already actually did this. The Democratic party has, over the last few years, aggressively purged “woke”-sounding language from their messaging and policies from their agenda. The Harris campaign was almost monomaniacally focused on projecting moderation and bipartisanship and on basic, kitchen-table economic issues. They relentlessly hunted the median voter with targeted messaging. They ran the campaign the popularists wanted, and lost. 

This theory is also belied by the fact that the most well-known progressive and radical politicians mostly did better than Harris. Rashida Tlaib performed significantly better, and while this was most pronounced with Arab and Muslim voters who rejected Harris over her stance on Israel and Gaza, it was even true in white working-class communities. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also won more votes than Harris. Understanding why thousands of people might vote for Trump and an avowed democratic socialist and vocal supporter of “woke” causes like trans rights is a key to understanding the election.

I would pause here to point out “woke,” like “rigged,” is about to vanish from public discourse.  It’s also worth remembering “woke” is just a cover for defending racist ideas. So “woke,” as a criticism, means caring too much about non-whites (“white” being, of course, the default baseline). 

Now, cutting to the chase:

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government. 

Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy. 

It’s important to note that Trump is resolutely not a social democrat, and these policies came into place during an emergency rather than due to ideological conviction. Indeed, he is currently running on the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history and Republicans’ Project 2025 would decimate the social safety net and immiserate millions. Beyond this, Biden wanted to continue many of these policies, but there wasn’t a political pathway. Instead, they quietly expired. To voters, however, the material reality is that when Trump left office, this safety net existed, and by the time of the 2024 election, it had evaporated. 

How could Democrats have countered this? One way was by making it a central issue, fighting publicly and openly to keep these protections and messaging heavily and constantly that Republicans were taking them away while Biden fought for them. An enormous body of research has established that social programs, when implemented, are difficult and highly unpopular to take away. These were universal programs, beneficial at all income levels. 

The political miscalculation the Biden administration made was that, lacking the political ability to implement these policies permanently, it was best to have them expire quietly and avoid the public backlash of gutting welfare programs and the black mark of taking a public political loss. This was a grave miscalculation. 

Why were Democrats unable to counter the idea that Trump was an economic savant? And why did most Americans vote for someone they believe will harm the country but help their own pocketbooks? The answer is the ongoing decimation of working-class institutions and civil society, started by neoliberalism, accelerated by the rise of the internet as a medium of interaction and put into overdrive during the isolation of Covid. The vehicles for building solidarity with others and for caring about strangers have been decimated. In crass terms, people have become more selfish.

There’s a more abstract explanation in the original, but frankly abstractions from little or no hard data have worn out their welcome with me. I like the idea that for one brief, shining moment, Americans knew what it meant to be Europeans. We were, for a brief, shining moment, practically Nordic.  But “communism” and “socialism” are worn-out terms; so let’s say it was too “woke.”

There’s a reason such programs are despised and condemned in American politics . People working as hard as they can to survive, or running as fast as they can to stay in one place, are easier to control. For only a moment, working class people knew they could demand better pay and conditions, or employers could do without employees.

This is America. That could not stand.

It’s still an economic argument (“It’s the economy, stupid.”), but it’s not one that says the electoral solution is to further diminish the distinction between the parties. This argument goes back to 1972, when McGovern was routed by Nixon, although then the issue was the war, not the economy. The problem of inflation, which started under Nixon’s first term and was not quelled until Volcker tamed it with interest rates under Reagan (and against Reagan’s wishes, until it worked, proving simultaneously the value of an independent Fed and the failure of the Chicago School’s argument that deficit spending causes inflation. The latter is still a shibboleth of the Republicans, another which Democrats have been forced to adopt. The last President to balance the budget was Clinton. Who noticed?). So it isn’t always the economy, stupid.

But this time, it probably was. Well, along with latent American racism.  Especially when the country just elected a blatant racist who isn’t (who is? Except people we don’t like, of course.), except he doesn’t like non-white people who don’t like him and flatter him, or leave the country when he tells them to. A guy who’s going to solve our national problems by eliminating birthright citizenship (but only for non-white people, of course!) At which point the 14th Amendment enters the chat. 💬 

By the way, anybody else notice the discussion of Arnold Palmer had no more effect than Entertainment Tonight 8 years ago? Is this a great , country, or what?

There, I think I’m done. Time to change my mind and change the subject. Advent starts in three weeks. Good timing, if you take advantage of it.