Processing the Unthinkable

It's real.

Like basically everyone else, I’m trying to process the unexpected and devastating election result. My thoughts are a bit of a jumbled mess, but I need to get them out of my own head for self-preservation purposes if nothing else. 

1) So many people didn’t want this to happen. The majority of people who voted in this election, critically. 65 million people and counting supported Hillary Clinton. When all the ballots are counted in California, her lead in the popular vote could be as many two million votes. 

I say this not because it will diminish Donald Trump’s power as President or erode the Republican majorities in the House and Senate or prevent the genuinely awful policy changes I believe are coming down the pike starting in January. But when we think about “what kind of country we are” and begin to build an opposition to President Trump, just remember that so many of our fellow citizens didn’t pick him, don’t accept him, and can be mobilized against his agenda. Even if they didn’t vote in the right states to make the Electoral College math work.

2) American democracy is garbage. In too many ways to keep track of. The stupid fucking Electoral College has chosen the candidate who won the second-fewest votes for the second time in 16 years. A decentralized electoral process and weakened Voting Rights Act allows conservative state legislators to suppress the votes of their political opponents. Essentially half of the voting eligible population doesn’t participate. The House districting process allows for flagrant partisan gerrymandering. The Senate makes a mockery of the “one person, one vote” principle. American citizens who live in the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories continue to lack federal representation. 

All of these structures devalue the political power of the people of color and younger citizens that comprise a big part of the Democratic base.

I have written before about my specific preferences when it comes to changing the rules we play by. As have others. 

But more than any single idea, Democrats and the left in general need to make fundamental reforms to American democracy a central issue. No more obligatory mentions of ideas to tinker around the edges. This is a central obstacle to our success. We need to start acting like it.

3) There must be massive resistance to President Trump. I won’t pretend to have all the answers and I don’t have any illusions about how difficult or dangerous this will be. But the wall, the Muslim ban, the massive deportations, all of it — cannot be tolerated or accommodated. 

4) It’s not that 538, The Upshot, and all the other outlets running sophisticated models attempting to predict the election result were wrong (though they were disastrously so at basically every stage of this cycle). After all, so was I was in what I thought and told other people. And so was the Clinton campaign’s vaunted data operation. 

But the social value of so much focus on predicting election results and obsessively refreshing 538 is ambiguous at best and actively harmful to our collective understanding of politics at worst. I genuinely hope that moving forward progressives worry more about how they can affect the future than how they can find the right equation to predict it.

5) Unified governments at the federal level don’t usually last long in the United States. The Tea Party wave swept aside the massive Democratic majority in 2010 after two years. Dissatisfaction with the Bush administration allowed Democrats to take back the House and Senate in 2006 after four years of unified GOP rule. Republicans took back the House and Senate two years into Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The new regime will face adversity. All governing coalitions do. Taking away healthcare from more than 20 million people will have political consequences. Incompetence on a political campaign is one thing, incompetence running a massive federal bureaucracy is entirely another. Trump will be forced to take responsibility for the malaise in parts of the country that elevated him to the presidency in the first place. Governing is hard, even for people with considerable political experience and especially for someone whose previous big claim to fame was starring in a reality television series.

I frankly have no sense of how this Administration will play out or if the normal rules of politics still apply. This is a terrifying, reactionary moment with untold consequences. But this is not the end of history either. Positive change is still possible, if we want it and work for it.

Current mood. (EPA photographer Jim Lo Scalzo)

6) Would Bernie Sanders have won if he was the nominee? Would Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Martin O’Malley? These are perhaps reasonable questions, but the answers are ultimately unknowable. The only data point we have is Clinton’s defeat.

The recriminations going on in Democratic Party circles right now are unpleasant but inevitable. Be skeptical of the media liberals and political hacks opportunistically jumping off the Clinton bandwagon now that she is no longer likely to be the next president. 

But also question why the Clinton campaign didn’t hold a single event in Wisconsin in the general election campaign. Ask them why the candidate spent basically the entire month of August 2016 fundraising out of public view. Ask them why they didn’t emphasize a liberal economic message that brought the Midwestern states home four years ago for President Obama. Ask them why didn’t they see this loss coming as they spent months - years! - confidently telling us that they had it in the bag. 

Ask the Democratic donors, labor unions, interest group leaders, and politicians at all levels of government why they rallied with near unanimity around a candidate who had alarmingly high unfavorable ratings for the entire campaign. Ask them why they tried to clear the primary field of other viable contenders for someone who was under FBI investigation. Ask them about an “electability” argument that was bullshit.

In retrospect, Barack Obama’s tremendous political talent papered over fundamental problems. It’s up to the leaders of a Democratic Party that now doesn’t control the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and roughly two-thirds of state governorships and state legislative seats to chart a different path forward.

7) I desperately wanted Clinton to win after she got the nomination and so wish we were talking about her historic victory and the first steps of her administration right now.

8) Clinton’s private email server and hacked messages from the Democratic National Committee and campaign chair John Podesta’s account dominated political news headlines and generated stories during the critical final weeks of the campaign. Combined with FBI Director Jim Comey’s criticism of Clinton’s judgement in a July press conference and his bizarre letter to Congress 11 days before the election seeming to re-open the investigation, it was hugely damaging. It is infuriating that this might have been the deciding factor.

9) Be aware of what huge obstacles sexism, racism, and xenophobia are to successful left politics.

10) The biggest policy changes the Republicans are probably going to pursue:

* Mass deportation and building a wall on the Southern border (in some form)

* Complete or partial repeal of the Affordable Care Act

* Repeal of Dodd-Frank; huge deregulation of the financial industry

* End of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, withdrawal of U.S. from Paris Climate Accords

* Enormous cuts to tax rates on income and investment-based earnings

* End of the Iran nuclear deal

Not to mention at least one but almost certainly more right-wing Supreme Court justices.

And that’s before we even entertain “end of liberal democracy as we know it,” “the free press and right to peacefully assemble is under serious threat,” or “thermonuclear war isn’t completely off the table” possibilities.

It’s going to be a long four years.

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