The Energizing Clarity Of Democracy

What this election has taught us about America and its future.

“You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing — you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is — with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong,” – Robert Harris in his novel Imperium.

This last decade or so, we’ve heard an awful lot about the new fragility of American democracy. So it bears noting that, after much angst, we somehow pulled this election off. Kudos to the election workers. Kudos to the voters for providing a clear and decisive result. Kudos to Harris for the graceful concession (in stark contrast to Trump in 2020). We have not lurched into another crisis of democratic legitimacy. No windows are being smashed; no statues are being torn down.

And there is, yes, a mandate. When one party wins the presidency, Senate, and probably the House, that’s usually the case. But this year, the policy divides were particularly clear, and the shift so clear and in one direction everywhere. Americans have voted for much tighter control of immigration, fewer wars, more protectionism, lower taxes, and an emphatic repudiation of identity politics. In the immortal words of Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” We’ll soon see how that pans out.

But the good news is that we have become less tribal. The president whom Ta-Nehisi Coates derided as whiteness personified just won more non-white votes than any Republican since Nixon. The allegedly xenophobic campaigner against illegal immigration gained massively among various Spanish-speaking constituencies and many legal immigrants, especially men. The champion of rural whites somehow also made his biggest electoral gains in the big, non-white cities, and among Hispanic voters in Texas border counties. A Republican whom the left and the legacy media called a “white supremacist” won about 24 percent of the black male vote and 47 percent of the Latino male vote.

What about the huge impact of enraged women we were told about, especially in the wake of the Selzer poll in Iowa? Again: a nothingburger. Biden won women by 12 points; Harris —a woman candidate after the end of Roe — won by only 7 points. Ruy Teixeira runs through the other demos here. Gen Z? Biden won women under 30 by 32 points, and Harris by a mere 18. Meanwhile, men under 30 went from +15 for Biden to +14 for Trump — a truly staggering swing! Trump gained among Jews and Muslims! Harris was the candidate of the Upper West Side. The Bronx moved massively to Trump.

How could an entire left-liberal worldview be more comprehensibly dismantled by reality? And yet, the primary response among my own liberal friends was rage at the electorate. They texted me to insist that Harris lost because of white people — white women, in particular, their favorite bêtes blanches. The NYT’s resident race-baiter, Nikole Hannah-Jones, made her usual point:

Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans — including white women — have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy.

In fact, among the few demos where Harris did better than Biden were white people earning over $100,000 a year, white women, white men, and “LGBT” voters — most of whom are now young, bi, white women in straight relationships. Warming to her racism, NHJ went after “the anti-Blackness … in Latino cultures as well.” Here’s how Joan Walsh put it:

[Biden]’s got a couple things that my girl Kamala didn’t have. A penis, and that nice white skin.

But more whites went for Kamala than Biden! If you want proof that critical race, gender and queer theory is unfalsifiable, you just got it. The Dems and most of the legacy media have literally no frame of reference outside “white-bad/black-and-brown-good” and “men-bad/women-good.”

And no, Harris did not run a “flawless campaign.” Please. She ran one with no coherent message. She picked a woke weirdo as veep. She embraced neocons like Liz Cheney while never breaking decisively with Biden or the left. She had no credible answers on immigration and inflation. She had nothing coherent to say on foreign policy. She thought Cardi B and Stephen Colbert were arguments.

On Trump as a potential dictator, Americans keep telling us they don’t really buy it. They may be wrong … and maybe they are. But if you are going to respect democracy, you also need to respect their judgment, and honor their choice. I suspect they think he will throw his weight around, but will be constrained as he was last time around by the ability of the American system to stymie most radical moves. But they want him to end mass illegal immigration, and I suspect they will give him some leeway to get there. The Dems had their chance to enforce the border and instead chose to open the floodgates. What Trump now does is therefore their responsibility too.

And the slow, corrosive impact of wokeness has taken a toll. I know many of you are tired of this emphasis, but I’m not wrong! It matters when the elites decide to re-educate the masses in Neo-Marxism. Young men are sick of being pathologized, as they should be. Urban residents — from San Francisco to New Jersey — are maddened by Democrats’ seeming indifference to violent crime. And one of Trump’s most effective ads — “it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor,” according to the NYT — was on Harris’ support for public funding for sex reassignments for illegal aliens and prison inmates. It packed a real punch among black and Latino men and suburban women.

The Democrats’ insistence that women have penises and men give birth is perhaps the most insane position any major political party has ever taken in US history. And how exactly do you remain a pro-woman candidate when you favor boys competing against girls in sports and women prisoners being forced to share intimate space with biological men convicted of rape? At some point, as Harris found out, you can’t. But can she and her party extricate themselves from this hole they keep digging ever deeper? I doubt it.

So here we are. I hate to break it to you, but it’s not just a Trump victory. It’s a Trump triumph. I also suspect it’s his high watermark. The policies he favors — and will have no excuse not to deliver on — will bring backlash, and pretty quickly. Drastic reductions in illegal immigration will hurt economic growth; tariffs will boost inflation; a deal with Putin in Ukraine may seem weak, not strong; ridding the federal government of DEI will not be easy; and too crude a DOJ crusade against his enemies will lose the center.

But Trump is now a world-historical figure, the most significant American politician of this century so far, with a real mandate. That requires, in my view, an attitude adjustment: not a doubling down of “resistance” but a strategy of engagement and discerning opposition. The way to get Trump to do what you want is to flatter and seduce him — the way Putin and Kim Jong Un do. I suspect that finally giving him the establishment respect he so desperately yearns for could be the most effective way of dealing with him. That requires a real shift in worldview among his opponents. And it will not come easy to many of us. But if this election doesn’t occasion that, what would?

Yes, this is democracy in action. It hasn’t died. It has, in fact, surprised us by revealing a much less tribal and less racially polarized country than we imagined, a vibrant electorate open to change and nuance, and two multiracial coalitions vying for power. Trump remains the unknown, of course. And we could be headed for disaster if both he and his opponents revert to form. But there is an opening here, if we want to take it. For the first time in eight years, I feel some small confidence in saying this once again, even as many around me seem sunk in despair.

Know hope.

Back On The Dishcast: Damon Linker

Damon is a political writer with a must-read substack, “Notes from the Middleground.” He’s been the editor of First Things and a senior correspondent at The Week, and he’s the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test. Back when we were both at Newsweek / Daily Beast, he edited my essays, so we’ve been friends for a while. We also both belong to the camp of conflicted moderates — plus we look like doppelgängers. The poor guy gets mistaken for me sometimes.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — if we should be more afraid of Trump this time around, and the effect of woke culture on men. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with Musa al-Gharbi on elites and wokeness. Man, Musa was vindicated this week. We also hear from readers on the election, the Supreme Court, abortion, and the trans debate.

Money Quotes For The Week

“To all who celebrate, happy third consecutive Last Election Ever!” – Seth Mandel.

“It is 1933. Hitler is in power. No time for a fucking seminar on Democrats messaging errors,” – Jen Rubin.

“Hitler seems to have done quite well with Jews and other minorities,” – Max Abrahms.

“You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians,” – Freddie deBoer.

“Kamala Harris tonight is battling Donald Trump…and Russia, which is trying to screw with the vote in Georgia and maybe elsewhere,” – David Corn.

“Dem-friendly pundits said one reason for picking Tim Walz was that he’d appeal to blue-collar guys in the industrial Midwest because they’d identify so much with him. He wears flannel shirts and everything. Kamala lost his home county,” – Glenn Greenwald.

“[T]he federal government that only got seven electric vehicle charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for illegal immigrants but doesn’t deliver them,” – Josh Barro.

“Turns out no one likes neocons. Who knew?” – Ana Kasparian.

“I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists,” – Laura Helmuth, editor of Scientific American, a woke propaganda rag.

“It was a terrible night for women, for children, for immigrants, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech … and guess what — it was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too; you just don’t realize it yet,” – Jimmy Kimmel in tears.

“Democrats need to be mature, and they need to be honest. And they need to say, ‘Yes, there is misogyny, but it’s not just misogyny from white men. It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men,’” – Joe Scarborough, with Al Sharpton nodding along.

“Democrats spent the final weeks of the campaign browbeating and shaming black and brown voters and telling them basically that they were stupid to even consider voting for Trump. This is what they got in return,” – Shadi Hamid.

“Kamala Harris will fall without a trace, just as she rose without a trace, but she’s nevertheless worth studying, in all her hollowness and banality, as an example of what has gone wrong with modern liberalism,” – Adrian Wooldridge.

Meme Of The Week

Yglesias Award Nominees

“Mea culpa: I was way too complacent about Trump’s political strength/durability. I really believed his appeal would largely be limited to MAGA, particularly after 1/6, his numerous serious crimes, a year of campaigning on overt authoritarian threats, and (especially) the Biden pro-labor/industrial policy agenda. … [I]t’s pretty clear that this confidence was badly misplaced,” – Greg Sargent.

“[Democrats] constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking to different cohorts because our focus groups or our polling shows that so-and-so appeals to such and such. That’s not how normal people think. It’s not common sense. And we need to start being the party of common sense again,” – Julie Roginsky, Dem strategist.

“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” – Seth Moulton, Dem congressman.

The View From Your Window

Bend, Oregon, 7.11 am

Dissents Of The Week

On the latest Dish, a reader writes:

You mentioned that you’re closer to Trump than Harris on “free speech.” We all know you don’t like being scolded or self-censored into lefty ideas. Fine. But focusing on that contretemps misses the actual stakes for free speech in this election. Trump has repeatedly — repeatedly! — called for persecuting his political enemies and using government to crush dissent — by, for example, pulling FCC licenses. Last week he “joked” about reporters being gunned down. And people with business in DC, such as Jeff Bezos, are already self-censoring rather than risk their government contracts in a potential second Trump administration.

Centrist Substack types love to complain about the censorious effect of some on the left, and imagine themselves closer to the right accordingly. But the war has widened and you’re missing how the battle lines have been redrawn. I hope I don’t have to say “told you so.”

I hope so too. If the threat to free speech is on the right, I’ll oppose it too. But left-liberal control of most legacy media is not going to end any time soon. At least it won’t now be used in defense of the powers-that-be.

Another dissent:

Saying that Trump didn’t become a dictator the last time, or that he didn’t really say Liz Cheney should be put in front of a firing squad, is irrelevant. It may be too much to call him a stochastic terrorist; I like to call him Schrödinger’s Comedian.  As in, Trump occupies a quantum state of uncertainty between hoping his fan club takes what he says seriously, and hoping everyone else thinks he’s just joking.  Yeah, he told the Proud Boys “stand back and stand by,” and nobody thought he was gonna back it up … and then people were so surprised that January 6 happened.

It’s a risk I didn’t want to take. But a democratic majority has just told me to calm down. I will — but stay vigilant of course. Another reader quotes me:

“Some questions — like abortion — really are hard to compromise on, but forcing one side’s settlement on everyone (Roe) is the illiberal move.” But when assessed at the individual level, there is only one side that is trying to force its settlement on anyone. You cannot compare freedom of choice vs a mandate on everyone as equal illiberal positions.

Another notes the photo caption we copied-and-pasted from Getty:

I don’t know if you edited the caption, but did you note how the woman holding a sign with the word “Nazi” is described as “woman,” but the man wearing Trump attire and holding what appears to be a Trump flag is described as “far-right protester”?

We didn’t edit it. More dissents are over on the pod page, arriving in your in-tray shortly. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

Daily Dish readers voted this video the best MHB of 2009 — simpler times:

In The ‘Stacks

• Turns out it was the Republicans who won on women’s rights.
• Matt Ford laments, “Liberals just lost the Supreme Court for decades to come.”
• Tim Noah assesses the failure of Harris to attract the working class. Bernie could have saved the Dems, argues Krystal Ball.
• Was it DEI that doomed the Democratic ticket?
• Biden should have quit while the Dems were ahead in 2022.
• Polymarket had a remarkable election night.
• Rogan’s reach dwarfs anything in the MSM, yet the Democrats snub him.
• Bob Wright asks, “Is Elon our first true oligarch?”
• Noah Smith is livid: “Why does Trump want to cancel the CHIPS Act??”
• Julie Bindel is befuddled by asexual “oppression”.
• Bethel McGrew contemplates politics and friendship.
• Matthew Crawford has reservations over surrogacy.
• How to attract more male teachers.
• Daily Overview is a great little ‘stack — a kind of satellite version of The View From Your Window.
• Dan Drezner takes stock of what he got wrong in the 2024 election. Subscribe for the tegridy!

The View From Your Window Contest