Every four years, after the presidential election, the opinions start to flow, gather strength and sheer volume and finally inundate us with explanations about what happened that run the gamut from the sensible to the barking mad. But, whether smart or dumb, those opinions pretty uniformly agree that, whatever the outcome, whatever the numbers, something truly profound has taken place. Depending on the bias of the opiner, it’s either a triumph or a catastrophe of historic proportions.
And so it is this year. Trumpers trumpet a new era, a laying waste of the forces of progressive darkness. Never Trumpers swear (again) that they’re leaving a country so benighted as to elect the second coming of Adolph Hitler, that the American voter is a hopeless basket case, too stupid and filled with hatred to grasp the obvious – Kamala Harris, the last best hope of humanity.
I demur. In a very important way, this is just another election and understanding it isn’t hard. Tuesday’s verdict was simple – a decisive rejection of four years of the Biden Administration. Mostly that means its opening of the southern border to millions of illegal immigrants and the spike in inflation brought on by massive and uncalled-for deficit spending. Take those two issues away and Harris may today be the President Elect.
The Democratic polling organization Blueprint makes the matter crystal clear.
- The top reasons voters gave for not supporting Harris were that inflation was too high (+24), too many immigrants crossed the border (+23), and that Harris was too focused on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class (+17).
- Other high-testing reasons were that the debt rose too much under the Biden-Harris Administration (+13), and that Harris would be too similar to Joe Biden (+12).
- These concerns were similar across all demographic groups, including among Black and Latino voters, who both selected inflation as their top problem with Harris.
(Notice that neither her nor Trump’s race or sex registered with voters.)
This happens every four years. Every presidential election is a referendum on the previous four years. Reagan’s well-remembered question – “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” – was of course an effort to get himself elected, but it was also a neat summary of every presidential race, the one invariable issue: do voters approve of the job done by the existing administration or don’t we?
And that’s what happened on Tuesday. For four years, Biden/Harris had given the middle finger to the legitimate needs and values of everyday Americans. Last Tuesday, those same Americans, in every demographic category, returned the gesture.
Recall 2020. We’d just completed four years of President Trump. And, after the polls closed and the results were in, we had the same onslaught of profound wisdom about what it all meant. We were told that the GOP had hitched its wagon to the wrong star, that it would have to spurn Trump and completely remake itself, that the Democratic Party’s embrace of its coalitions constituted unassailable political wisdom.
None of that wisdom would long hold. The reality was that, after four years, voters were sick of Donald Trump and turned out in record numbers to demonstrate the fact.
Four years later, the electorate have done the same, just to different officeholders.
But this year there’s more to the results than Biden Administration incompetence and tone-deafness. This election has a clear class dimension. It’s not only a repudiation of bad policies, voters also rejected elitist values that have been voiced by the party in power, executed by the White House and brayed nonstop by the legacy news media.
British historian Niall Ferguson said it concisely:
This election was a crushing defeat for political lawfare, critical race theory, woke campuses, biological males in women’s sports, genital mutilation of teenagers, the Ivy League, the legacy media, and Hollywood.
To Ferguson’s list, I add defunding the police, decriminalizing crime, the mendacity of the press and the idea that Americans generally are racist and sexist.
Even Maureen Dowd at the NYT got the message, albeit many years too late.
The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like ‘Latinx,’ and ‘BIPOC’ (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).
This alienated half the country, or more.
Little of that was Biden/Harris policy per se, but enough policy and messaging sprang from those progressive attitudes to make the two essentially indistinguishable. And neither has much in common with the values of Americans generally or the very concepts on which this country is based.
It is that vast chasm between everyday American voters and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that handed the election to a man many people, myself included, find reprehensible.
Regardless of your take on Donald Trump, that is an unambiguously good thing. It’s what true democracies do; it’s what they’re supposed to do. When governing elites repudiate the nation’s fundamental values and sneer at ordinary voters, it is Job 1 for those voters to slap them down and demand they return to the basics of governance. And that’s what happened.
In politics, the game is never over; power eternally ebbs and flows, but for now, the American voting public is ascendant, elites are chastened.
What will the next four years bring?
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
