No one can explain Trump's victory
The columns people are writing and their comments on social media tell me that everyone thinks the world revolves around them, but they don't tell me why he won.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.”
The world is now awash in columns and comments on social media that offer an argument of this form:
Trump won.
I, Editorialist, dislike the Democrats because of x.
∴ x is why Trump won.
The flaw in the argument is obvious: It’s patently solipsistic. But a sea of journalists are now briskly conflating their own views with those of the electorate at large. Perhaps they just need to fill up the space in the newspaper and they’re hoping no one will notice they have nothing new to say.
Nothing so brightens me when I’m low as pointing out the deficiencies of The New York Times, so to illustrate this point, here are some examples of the phenomenon from their front page.
Bret Stephens, in a column titled, “A party of prigs and pontificators suffers a humiliating defeat,” argues that Harris lost because she made the following errors:
She chose a progressive running mate who couldn’t deliver states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
She failed to separate herself from Joe Biden.
She called Trump a fascist, which insulted his supporters.
She relied on celebrity surrogates.
She was unable to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy.
She failed convincingly to repudiate left-wing positions she took in 2019.
She was anointed without political competition, even though Bret Stephens warned Democrats she was weak.
What’s more:
Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously.
Democrats believed things were fine, even great, in Biden’s America, and anyone who didn’t agree was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe.
Democrats refused to see how profoundly distasteful “modern liberalism” is to Americans. (He leaves the term undefined.)
Democrats called people who were concerned about gender transitions for children or biological males playing on girls’ sports teams transphobes.
Democrats called people who loathe DEI seminars racists.
Democrats use irritating terms that call to mind 1984.
Democrats are incorrigible social engineers who seek to sort everyone according to group identity then impose their bizarre cultural norms on everyone else.
Democrats refused to treat Trump as a normal political figure and instead viewed him as a mortal threat to democracy. (He argues that whether or not this was correct, it was just bad strategy.)
Democrats tried to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado.
Democrats tried to put Trump in prison on “hard-to-follow” charges. (Why he thinks the charges were hard to follow is unclear.)
This “distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing,” and “made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical.”
He concludes that by expressing the fear that “liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time, and the humility to change.”
A man who prizes introspection, discipline, and humility might have noted an obvious point, which is that nowhere in this column does he offer evidence that any item on this list was the cause of the Kamala Harris’s defeat. This is a list of Bret Stephens’ reasons for disliking Kamala Harris and the Democrats. That’s all it is. If you read his columns regularly, you know that these were his opinions before the electorate rendered its verdict, and they would have been his opinions no matter what verdict they rendered. If you’re seeking to understand why the election turned out as it did, however, this column tells you nothing.
Many of my readers, including me, agree with him about some or all of these points. I fully agree that Democrats use irritating terms that call to mind 1984. (My quarrel with the Democrats, on the other hand, is not that they tried to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot and put him in prison. It’s that they failed.) This is beside the point. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with every point he makes. That only establishes that two people—you and Bret Stephens—dislike Democrats for same reasons. It doesn’t prove that 50.9 percent of the electorate shares your views; indeed, that’s highly unlikely to be the case, given the vast gulf in education, household income, literacy, and worldview between the average reader of the Times (or this newsletter) and the mean American voter.
If we polled a sample of people large enough to represent the electorate to a certain level of confidence, asked them whether this is why they voted for Trump, and discovered that they all said, “yes,” it would tell us a little bit more. But it still wouldn’t satisfy me, because I don’t think there’s a strong connection between the way people explain their vote—to themselves and to others—and the real reasons they vote as they do.
People construct stories about their preferences and actions; that’s the way the human mind works. But these stories are not necessarily correct and are often, obviously, incorrect. The way people really make decisions is complex, intuitive, opaque, and very often unconscious, whereas the stories we tell ourselves tend to be simple and egosyntonic. Very few people, for example, say to themselves, “I voted for Trump because I saw his commercials over and over and I’m easily swayed by commercials.” We like to think of ourselves as reasoning, informed, motivated by serious things, and hard to dupe. But the advertising is exactly why a non-trivial number of people voted for him. Of course it is: If advertising didn’t work, neither campaign would have spent a fortune on it.1 We have excellent empirical evidence that political advertising works very well.
Even more important is this: Suppose we knew for sure that 50.9 percent of the electorate agreed with every word Bret Stephens wrote and that their unconscious and conscious agendas were perfectly aligned, as were their public and private personas. It still wouldn’t explain why they voted for Trump. It’s possible to believe every word Stephens wrote is true and also think that Donald Trump is so much worse that it would have been unthinkable to vote for him. (Stephens allows for this possibility, implicitly, in saying he voted for Kamala Harris.) Knowing why the electorate disliked Kamala Harris isn’t even interesting unless we also know why didn’t they didn’t dislike Trump enough to overcome these objections and vote for her.
The latter question is the great mystery. I agree that Biden was a deeply unsatisfactory president who failed the greatest tests of his tenure. Kamala Harris would have been no better and quite possibly much worse. But none of this matters if you consider the problem with Trump for even a moment, which distilled to its essence is this: He’s a lunatic who tried to stage an autogolpe.
I want to understand why 50.9 percent of the electorate knowingly voted for a man who was, and is, prepared to disregard their vote. This isn’t easily explained. Voting for someone who will not respect the single most important rule of our political system (or the ten next most important rules, for that matter) is a very different act from voting for a candidate whose policies or personality you greatly prefer. One of these decisions is not like the other. One of them ends the system itself. The fact that so many Americans knowingly voted to do this indicates there’s a huge divergence between the stories people are telling themselves about why they voted as they did and the reality.
This reasoning was enough to persuade Bret Stephens not to vote for Trump. If his criticisms of the Democrats weren’t enough to persuade him to ignore Trump’s willingness to overturn an election, why does he assume this is why Trump’s voters were convinced?
If you’re not yet persuaded that this species of argument is frivolous, let’s continue with the front page of The New York Times. Here’s Peter Beinart, who argues, “Democrats ignored Gaza and brought down their party.” Beinart’s argument is actually a bit more sound than Stephens’ because he is, at least, trying to justify it in terms of new information gained from exit polls, and he also allows that this is surely only a part of the story. But it’s the same species of argument. The Democrats lost, in his account, for these reasons:
The Biden Administration sent weapons to Israel even after Netanyahu expanded the war into Lebanon.
Harris didn’t break with Biden’s policy.
Harris went “out of her way” to make voters who care about Palestinian rights feel unwelcome.
When anti-Israel activists interrupted her, Harris replied, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.”
Her campaign wouldn’t let a Palestinian-American speak at the DNC.
Bill Clinton told a crowd in Michigan that Hamas forced Israel to kill civilians by using them as human shields.
Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney instead of Rashida Tlaib.
Democrats treat “the struggle for Palestinian freedom” as a taboo.
Readers who nodded in agreement with Bret Stephens may find it easier to see the many ways Beinart’s argument is flawed. But in fact, they’re flawed in the same way. Anyone who’s been reading Peter Beinart for a while knows that like Bret Stephens, he held all of these views before the election and nothing about the result changed his views. Like Stephens, he conflates his own opinions, those of someone who is highly unrepresentative of the electorate, with those of the whole electorate. Like Stephens, he arrives at the suspiciously convenient conclusion that the outcome proves he’s been right all along.
Beinart points out that Harris did worse with young, black voters than Biden. He believes this is why:
A June CBS News poll found that while most voters over the age of 65 supported arms sales to Israel, voters under the age of 30 opposed them by a ratio of more than three to one. And while only 56 percent of white voters favored cutting off weapons, among Black voters the figure was 75 percent.
He then notes, “Her share of white voters equaled Mr. Biden’s. Among voters over age 65, she actually gained ground.” (He doesn’t seem to realize that this is significant. If we assume that voters vote the way they do because of issues like this, I’ll counter that she would have lost these voters had she followed his council. Of course, the only thing I’d really be proving by saying this is that I would have been appalled if Democrats had embraced the policy he endorses.)
All of these columns are stupid and sloppy, and there is something about them that’s rubbing me the wrong way. Perhaps it’s the dishonesty. The truth is this: We don’t know why she lost. Whatever it is that we like or dislike about Harris, the Democrats, or Trump may have something to do with why she lost—or it may not.
Had she won 1.1 percent more of the vote in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would have won. This probably means that if Elon Musk had stayed out of the election, she would have won. (Or maybe not.) Had Russia stayed out, likewise. (Or maybe not.) The difference between defeat and victory was so slender that it could have gone the other way if the weather had been different.
The real question, the one I’m no closer to understanding (despite ten goddamned years of reading columns like these) is why more than half of the American electorate would even dream of voting for Donald Trump.
And now, I have another question, one that seems every bit as unanswerable. Why did every one of our vaunted safeguards fail? Every last one of them failed us in a country founded and conceived and designed to be despot-proof. This is astonishing. In the end, none of it worked.
These questions will haunt the world forever, like debates about the real cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. But they’re profound questions. It’s ludicrous to argue that an event of this magnitude occurred because Kamala Harris didn’t let a Palestinian-American speak at the DNC or used the word “Latinx,” or because Beyoncé stumped for her.
I suppose we’re furiously constructing these stories now because it’s unbearable that we don’t understand, and may never understand, how an event of such world-shaking, revolutionary magnitude came to pass. It is so much bigger than what might be explained by appeal to the Democrats’ penchant for terms like “birthing people.”
Maybe nothing caused the First World War but some Serbian lummox who shot an archduke. Maybe nothing caused the collapse of American democracy but some Democratic yutz who said “birthing people” one too many times.
But probably not. So let’s not insult our own intelligence—or diminish the gravity of the moment—by publishing one after another column for which these words may be substituted: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’ve been right about everything. You should have listened to me.”
Matthew Ancona—former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph and then The Spectator—put his finger on what it is that bothers me about these columns. They trivialize it. He writes:
Do not avert your gaze. Do not seek bogus comfort in the countless rationalizations that are already on offer. Accept Donald Trump’s election to a second presidential term for what it is: a world-historic moment that probably challenges just about every political, social, and moral assumption you hold dear. …
There is something of this cognitive failure in the initial response to Trump’s extraordinary victory, which has inspired a carnival of rationalization. So: it was the economy and inflation that did it. Or it was Kamala Harris’s inability to define herself. Or it was Joe Biden’s stubborn refusal to drop out until late in the electoral cycle; or, conversely, his failure to stand his ground, thus robbing the Democrats of the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump. It was punishment for incumbency. It was the unfavorable astrological position of the moon relative to Venus …
Doubtless all of these and many other factors will feature in the lengthy autopsy and audit to come. But they do not capture the sheer scale of the moment, its thunderous force and tectonic origins. …. The citizens of the world’s most powerful nation chose authoritarianism over conventional democracy. …
It is time to accept the unpalatable truth that a great many voters like Trump’s approach to public life and his absolute disdain for all of its traditional guidelines and guardrails. ... They granted him a second term not in spite of his character but because of it. A liar, a convicted criminal, and a sexual predator he may be. But, for an alarmingly large number of Americans, the dark side of his personality is intrinsic to the brutish strength that they manifestly seek from their next president. They wanted him back.
If you believe (as I do) in the legacy of the Enlightenment, the pre-eminent value of truth, the centrality of science, the primacy of reason, and the quest for pluralist decency, then the electoral success—the return from the political abyss—of a figure like Trump is, to say the least, difficult to digest. But digest it we must. … Trump’s triumph entrenches the MAGA movement once and for all and will turbocharge its future as a global franchise. It is a terrible blow to the cause of liberal democracy, the precious principles of pluralism, the rule of law.
There is no direction to history and sometimes things really are as bad as they look. I am reminded of General Corman’s words in Apocalypse Now: “There’s a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’”
On Tuesday, in America, the darkness did prevail, in ways that will reverberate all over the planet for decades to come.
The cover of the magazine in which he wrote it says more than any of these columns.
Postscript:
The US election is over. There is a lot happening in the rest of the world. My goal now is to keep up with the global news and write about it intelligibly for you every day, or most days. I expect it will be a challenge to think deeply about the why of it, because the boulders are about to begin rolling down the hills very quickly. (They are already.)
I assume American journalists will barely notice the chaos we’ve unleashed abroad, since they pay little attention to the rest of the world under the best of circumstances, and they’ll be far too busy chronicling the chaos we’ve unleashed at home. But the consequences of this election will be immense—even more immense for others than they are for Americans—and those who will feel them had no say in our election. Everyone who lived in the world Americans built must now figure out how to live in a new one. No one knows how. But the pin is now well and truly out of the hand grenade.
Someone needs to write about this. So I’ll keep doing what I do. Please subscribe if you want to know how the story of the rest of the world continues. I’ll do my best to tell you.
Let’s hope for the best.
It makes me ill to think how much the two campaigns spent on advertising. Imagine if they’d spent that to buy us a new aircraft carrier, or something else we’d all love and cherish.
I am curious that, despite all your long quotations from columns by Harris voters about why Trump won (and you make a good point when you call them solipsistic) you never quote from any columns by Trump voters. There are plenty of intelligent people who are aware of Trump's flaws but still consider the Democrats a bigger threat to their way of life, and voted accordingly. (Rod Dreher and Richard Hanania are two such people whom I follow). Perhaps authors like that are a better source to what's going on inside the minds of Trump voters than the speculations of Bret Stephens and the like.
Trump's victory is easy to explain, one in three eligible voters didn't bother to cast a vote. Americans are willing to subject themselves to minority rule, damn the consequences to them.