Americans woke up Wednesday to the sound of chardonnay being poured over Cheerios as the busybody class cried into its breakfast. It was a natural reaction for the many people not just surprised, but disappointed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House — and the ranks of Republicans riding to victory alongside him. Continuing a theme from the campaign, some on the losing side immediately accused voters of fascism, sexism, racism, and a variety of other very bad isms as the explanation for how they marked their ballots. And therein lies a clue to why this year’s election ended as it did.
“I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify; who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States,” Joe Biden pledged after winning the White House from Donald Trump in 2020. “We have to stop treating our opponents as enemies.”
Biden’s win came after four years of bullying and trash-talking by President Trump, and the chaos of the pandemic. The promise of moderation from a politician who didn’t pick fights with opponents was appealing to enough voters seeking calm to change control of the presidency. But that didn’t last. Just months into Biden’s presidency, then-CNN editor-at-large Chris Cilizza pointed out that, under new management, the federal government was spending trillions of dollars and vastly growing in scope. Biden “may well be on the verge of radically overhauling the relationship between the federal government and the average American,” he added. Moderation was off the table. By the next year, Biden was accusing his political foes of “semi-fascism” and denouncing them as a “threat to this country.” The “semi” got dropped for the 2024 campaign trail when both Biden and his designated successor as the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, called Donald Trump a “fascist.” Republican voters got tagged by the incumbent president as “garbage.”
The problem with viciously bad-mouthing your critics is that you lose any advantage you might have claimed over the trash-talker you originally sought to set yourself apart from. And that’s a big loss when your claim of moderation was immediately abandoned for a program of ambitious government spending and intervention in the economy that made life much more expensive for the average American.
“Our research shows mathematically that the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain,” Mark Kritzman, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management concluded in a paper published last summer. That “burst” of inflation has lingering effects. According to the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, it currently takes US$120.54 (C$167) to purchase what US$100 would buy when President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021.
With moderation, unification, and economic acumen off the table as selling points, Democrats turned to “saving democracy” as their rallying cry. “Fascist” Trump and his supporters threatened our democratic system of government, they insisted.
But Kamala Harris was anointed as the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew from the race. Nobody voted for her in the usual system of primaries, she was just handed the job by party insiders. That gave Trump and his supporters cause to point to Democrats as threats to democracy.
So, for that matter, did the Biden-Harris administration’s practice of leaning on social media platforms to suppress inconvenient news stories and criticism of government policies. During his vice-presidential debate with Tim Walz, J.D. Vance called out Kamala Harris for “saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in misinformation.”
Through all of this, the news media largely carried water for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. That’s understandable, given that eleven times more journalists identify as Democrats (36.4 per cent) than as Republicans (3.4 per cent) according to the American Journalist Survey. But that produces record-low trust in the media among the public, especially those who aren’t Democrats.
CNN’s Brian Stelter acknowledged the problem the morning after the election, presumably with bowl full of cereal and wine, writing that Donald Trump’s “defeat of Kamala Harris is raising questions about the media’s credibility, influence, and audience.”
Such capture of institutions by not just Democrats, but their most progressive elements, has become a feature of the culture wars. It’s meant battles over politicized universities and their unfriendliness towards dissenting opinions, boycotts of businesses considered too “woke,” and concerns that banks are denying financial services to people over their political views.
Many Americans feel besieged by a smug establishment of which Democrats are the political face.
Trump and his new, populist version of the Republican party offer a haven for those who believe the system views them with hostility and contempt. Exit polling this year found rural dwellers, lower-income voters, young people, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians and those without college degrees shifting towards the Republicans. Hispanic men preferred Trump over Harris by 10 points.
That still leaves plenty of people favouring Harris and the Democrats, especially among those well-educated and financially comfortable. But that’s exactly the problem for many new Republicans.
The fact that Democrats have been snotty and entitled in their dealings with many Americans doesn’t mean that voters’ rejection of their elitism is an unalloyed good. An alternative to something awful isn’t inherently a positive option. President-elect Donald Trump is an authoritarian who has threatened the broadcast licenses of unfriendly media operations, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance favours an activist government that punishes enemies, and the Republican party of today has largely forgotten its free-market roots as it embraces populist economic snake oil.
But American voters already knew this about the GOP and its current leader. Democrats had a chance to offer something less destructive in 2020. Instead, they pulled a bait-and-switch with contempt for much of the population, destructive spending and regulatory policies, and soft totalitarian intolerance for dissent.
Now it’s up to Donald Trump and the Republican party he remade in his image to keep their promises to be better than Democrats. If they don’t, the American people can kick them to the curb in turn.
National Post