The Scary Truth Behind Trump's Win

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, much of the media is repeating the mistake made in 2016 and attribution Trump's victory to worries over the economy and economic conditions.  The truth is far scarier and paints a far less flattering image of Trump voters.  This is partly exposed by the same Republicans who panned the economy under Biden/Harris even though the underlying data said otherwise suddenly have a far rosier view of the economy even though nothing has change and, more significantly, Trump's economic proposals will send consumer prices and interest rates soaring.  The real and more frightening truth is that many Trump voters despise liberal democracy where the civil rights and economic prospects of marginalized groups - think non-whites, non-Christians, and LGBT citizens - have improved and equality has become more real.  These voters want a return to the white dominated, white privilege days of the 1950's where women, blacks, Hispanics, and gays knew their place and white males were supreme. Worse yet, many Americans are not as nice as they pretend to be and they have little compunction about harming those they dislike as noted in a piece in The Atlantic:

[T]he Trump movement has never been, to my mind, strictly concerned with tangible issues; part of the allure is immaterial by nature, addressed to elemental human urges. Trump offered something special on that count from the beginning—a politics consisting not mainly of a positive vision but rather of a series of opportunities to own the libs. In this project, rational policy details aren’t a priority and are sometimes absent altogether; the point is domination of one’s enemies, a libidinal desire.

Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. . . . . Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them.

Trump, Greenberg wrote, “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.” Trump is, in other words, an atavist, inviting citizens to satisfy all of their hungry drives, all of their libidinous instincts: His America is a place for malign energies to express themselves in action. There’s a certain pleasure in that, perhaps, a kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.

Cruelty and subjugation of others is the point. Sadly, too many are afraid to call out Trump voters for who they are and instead the smoke screen of "economic concerns" masks the real story.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality further: 

Kamala Harris was defeated, economists tell us, by rising prices. Simply put, the vice president could not overcome working-class voters’ anger over the rise in the cost of living, for which they blamed the Biden administration.

But this narrative focuses on the wrong question: why Harris lost. The more relevant question is how Donald Trump could have won. Malaise over the price level cannot possibly explain the reelection of probably one of the most destabilizing politicians the world has seen since the end of World War II.

Explaining the rise of Trump as a consequence of economic forces battering the working class is not a new approach. In 2016, we were told the culprit was globalization and the related “China shock” that destroyed 1 million or so manufacturing jobs.

Just like today, this analysis misses the forest for the trees. Twice already, more or less half of American voters have elected a guy who promises to overthrow the liberal world order — to do away with democratic institutions, values, and norms, trample on human rights, blow up the economy — and to bend the nation, and the world, to his will.

While voters might be forgiven for 2016 on the grounds that they hadn’t fully understood what Trump was talking about, this year they knew well what they were doing.

The economic interpretation of voters’ embrace of Trump is suspect not just because it is so narrow. For all the polls demonstrating Americans’ grim assessment of the economy, consumers have kept up spending as if they have few worries in the world. For all the gripes about the cost of living, real wages for typical American workers have been rising faster than inflation.

The idea that Democrats could have stopped Trump if only they had picked a candidate not entangled with the Biden administration’s economic record misses the point. Trump shifted the Overton window, allowing Americans to express profound hostility not only toward economic policymaking and its consequences but also toward the whole tapestry of modern society.

While identifying strands of voters’ discontent can be useful, the analysis must not miss sight of what Nov. 5 revealed about their broad-based disgust. To steer voters away from Trump’s “blow it all up” approach will require figuring out how to invite them into a country that feels alien to so many — a society that is continually changing to embrace new peoples, cultures and technologies, products, environmental constraints, languages, religions, forms of expression, gender identities, sexual affinities, and so on. Voters’ disgust might appear as though it is aimed at venal leaders out of touch with the salt of the earth. But it amounts to a rejection of what America is becoming.

But the disgust has other strands. Take immigration. It is hardly nuts for Americans to recoil at the idea of hundreds of thousands of foreigners entering the country illegally. But the animosity toward migrants runs deeper, feeding on aging White voters’ fears of demographic decline that has enabled the “Great Replacement” narrative promoted by the likes of Tucker Carlson.

In a NORC survey in 2017 that focused on questions related to American identity, almost half of respondents said that illegal immigration amounted to a threat to “the American way of life.” Seventy-one percent of respondents to that poll said the United States was “losing its national identity.”

This unease extends to other dimensions, such as religion and sexuality. Overall, 52 percent of respondents to a poll last year by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution thought that America’s best days are behind it. Fifty-five percent, including three quarters of Republicans, said the country’s way of life has mostly changed for the worse since the 1950s.

Altogether, three-fourths of Americans today believe the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Fewer than one-third believe the country is a well-functioning democracy.

The idea that American voters expressed their economic malaise at the polls comes attached to a bolder claim: that Harris’s loss was merely part of a worldwide anti-incumbent fever caused by post-pandemic inflation.

The challenge for the standard-bearers of capitalist liberal democracy is not to offer a better strategy against the vagaries of the economic cycle. It is to bring aboard the many citizens who reject where liberal market democracy has brought them. The challenge is urgent, because the other side is offering to end liberal democracy altogether.