cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/27878542
After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.
Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.
Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.
Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.
“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” - George Carlin
The American dream has always been a lie to get people to grind the 9-5 (more like 3 jobs and a side hustle nowadays) for the benefit of the capitalists who steal the value of our labour, and to manufacture consent for all sorts of evils via another lie that is exceptionalism.
Also, while we might not call it the American dream in other countries, the same capitalist bullshit is peddled all over the globe.
It’s about fucking time people stopped believing in it, the more people get disillusioned, the likelier we are to achieve actual change, and not just a superficial change to the heads of the pyramid.
Is this the end of the country as we know it?
Betteridge’s law. So no. Still, I don’t disagree with the sentiment…
What drives American politics now is, rather, the unfettered power of money, much of it managed by groups outside party control who do not have to declare their funding sources and can make or break candidates depending on their willingness to follow a preordained set of policy prescriptions.
The Democrats, meanwhile, can talk all they want about serving the interests of all Americans, but they too rely on dark money representing the interests of Wall Street, big tech companies and more, and are all but doomed to come off as hypocritical and insincere as a result.
And yet, The Guardian still lives in another era.
What drives politics now is attention. That’s it. The more eyeballs you have, the more people see your message from their feed, their favorite influencer, whatever, the more support you have.
It’s that simple.
Doesn’t matter if it’s cynical, or a blatant lie, that’s irrelevant. People’s information bubbles aren’t checked or audited anymore.
Americans are not thinking of high concepts like the American Dream or isolationism/protectionism, they’re voting by how they feel, and they feel Trump is their friend because he blots out the sun. Even if the Dems were more cynical than him, they’d never have a chance unless they play that game.
I’m not sure I agree with this read.
I think the Dems agonising over Trump have missed the point of this election and are over complicating things. If we look at the numbers, at the moment (95% of votes counted) the Reps got 74m votes (same as 2020) and the dems got 70m - thats an incredible 11m down on 2020 when 81m voted Dem.
Trump has not made some great breakthrough; he’ll probably be up 1-2m in the end but that’s a few percent only; up 2-3%. The dems may end down a little less than 11m but that ball park is right and still a HUGE number; thats 13-14% of their votes lost! The real story of this election is not Trump breaking through but the Dems: they failed to get voters to vote for them and fell back.
So all this agonising over how to beat Trump, and Trump being the story, and Trump having all the attention is wrong. The Dems lost this election because they keep making the same mistakes. The electorate decides what the issues of the campaign are, not the political parties. For the voters it was clear the number 1 issue was the economy, and immigration was as up there too as a priority. Trump spoke to his supporters about the economy & immigration, and despite his rambling speeches his campaign team packaged that into bite-size chunks for their friendly media and for social media; his message got through to his voters and his vote held up.
The Dems decided the most important issues were around women’s rights and protecting democracy. They seemingly decided the electorate was wrong on the economy because in their minds Biden created so many jobs, and Biden put in the inflation reduction act and so on. It didn’t matter to the Dems how voters felt about that; the Dems seemingly felt like because the stats said they’d done well they didn’t need to address that issue. And the Dems seemingly decided that immigration was not an issue to tackle; instead the topic was treated as a sign of how backwards and hateful the republicans for focusing on it. So instead of actually addressing the concerns of voters as a whole, they focused on the issues that rile up the core voters in the democrat party.
The 50:50 split in the polls was a nonsense; that was always “% of likely voters”. The real underlying numbers actually show a 1:3 split: 1/3 Dem, 1/3 Rep and 1/3 unlikely to vote. In 2020 the Dems won because they got some of that other 1/3 on side. In this election they did not; they fell back to their own voters. Bizarrely if the Dems did target anyone, it was the 1/3 of Reps who they hoped would be disgusted at Trump. They seemed to forget that regardless of Trump, Reps is a broad coalition who disagree with the Dems on various other issues - that might be social issues, or the size of the state, or welfare or immigration. Those voters would hold their nose and vote Trump and were not in play. Meanwhile the Reps got their vote out, and a slither of that 1/3 and that was more than enough to beat the Dems.
The Dems could have won this election, but they ran a terrible campaign. And I don’t mean Harris herself; she was given an impossible task taking over last minute with someone elses election machine - I mean a terrible campaign over the past 2 years. The DNC prevented an open primary against Biden, despite serious concerns last year around his fitness. The DNC supported Biden in his intransigence in leaving the race and lied about his fitness, and then when he finally left when it was clear he was unfit they were complicit in a rushed coronation for Harris. Harris then had the impossible task of trying to campaign as a change candidate while being unable to criticise Biden as her Vice president, and also inheriting a campaign structure that was tied to Biden and run by Biden loyalists.
Trump did not blot out the sun. The Democrats decided to talk to themselves and not the electorate.
And the Dems seemingly decided that immigration was not an issue to tackle; instead the topic was treated as a sign of how backwards and hateful the republicans for focusing on it. So instead of actually addressing the concerns of voters as a whole, they focused on the issues that rile up the core voters in the democrat party.
Thing is, Harris was like the most anti-immigrant Dem candidate in ages, policy wise. She shamelessly adopted some populist economic policy, same as Trump. Popular policy was there, and it was pretty loud in my own news feed.
Not that I disagree with you about the Dems talking to themselves, speaking to voters instead of listening to them, all that shenanigans with the primary and Biden’s fitness… but how does that even compare to the controversies surrounding and following Trump?
I say the Dems would have been screwed even if they set Biden aside early, even if they pounded and focused on issues that actually mattered to voters. It doesn’t matter! That’s just drama most persuadable voters don’t hear it. No, Dems lost the information war. Trump delivered is message to his voters, hence he didn’t lose a soul, while the dems campaigned like its 1950 and didn’t have the ‘luxury’ of a pandemic to hammer their message straight into voters’ lives.
Just to reiterate all this, I don’t understand how everyone is underestimate the massive impact warped social feeds have in the average person’s life now. That’s literally all that affected everyone I know, bar one or two nutcases like me that don’t have a Facebook or Tiktok account.
Great take, I think this nails it.
Assuming we still have free and fair elections in 2026 I suspect the Dem base will be fired up again. Question is if it will be too late.
So did a lot more people turn of age between 2016 and 2020? Because the numbers I see go like this:
2016
Clinton: 65Mil
Trump: 62Mil
2020
Biden: 81Mil
Trump 74Mil
2024
Harris: 70Mil
Trump: 74Mil
If you look at 2016 to 2020, there’s a sudden jump of 28 million voters. But only the democrats lost voters between 2020 and 2024. Trump likely had the exact same people voting for him in 2024 as 2020.
But, again, where did that innitial 28 million voters come from???
There’s a huge pool of non-voters to pull from since voter turnout never a high percentage, so perhaps a lot more turned out after Trump’s term to make sure he didn’t have a second. Then the question is, where’d they go this time around?
There’s also population growth, but I doubt that’s a huge factor.
100%
This is it. Fantastic summary
a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward,
Oh, don’t we just miss the good ole’ days when the US could perpetrate colonialist violence without worrying about any blowback, eh?
…and I feel fine.
