Are We Sanewashing the Voters Now?

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.” ― Leo Tolstoy

Happy Sunday.

We have a lot to talk about, don’t we?

Consider this the first in a series of post-mortems, and if I get anything wrong, blame the jet lag. But it’s good to be home, waking up in my own bed and back with the boys. Here they are Saturday morning, on alert, because there are deer and turkeys out there in the woods.

Photos by J.F. Riordan. And yes, those are my feet under the covers.

Auggie and Eli also wanted to make sure that we’re not leaving again anytime soon….

A reminder that you are still not the crazy ones.

To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. You may disagree with me from time to time (and I expect you will, because I’m not promising you a safe space here). But I’ll always try to give it to you straight. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. (And I’m immensely grateful for your generous support.)

A Cascade of Fails

Apparently, the Democrats have decided to bypass the autopsy and move straight to an orgy of self-flagellation. The pundit herd is rushing to catch up, firing off all the deep thoughts and hot takes they did not have before the election itself.

“Victory,” John F. Kennedy once mused, “has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” But defeat also launches a thousand excuses, recriminations, and second-guesses.

So, all the fingers are being pointed at: Joe Biden, the Never Trumpers, Liz Cheney¹, the border, and the economy. All the priors are confirmed. The moderates blame the woke left; the progressives blame the moderates; and nobody (for the moment at least) wants to say anything nice about Kamala Harris’s campaign.

All of this is understandable, given the Dems’ crushing defeat and the triumphant return of the rapey, seditionist, convicted felon to power. Trump not only swept all seven of the swing states but won the popular vote by a comfortable margin. This time around the Democrats’ disarray is very real.

So, there is a lot of coping amid this collective nervous breakdown. And for the record, I agree with a lot of the criticism, and they will be the subject of future newsletters.²

But today I wanted to take a step back from the horse-race approach to post-election coverage.

We know who won and who lost; and it’s legitimate to ask questions about what failed. But it seems far more important to take a longer and deeper look at what “succeeded.”

As Susan Glasser reminded us, the campaign embraced by a solid majority of American voters “was the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia ever waged.”

This is what “worked.” This is what “won.”

That seems like a bigger story than what failed.

As Glasser noted, “It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be.”

“This election was a CAT scan on the American people,” Peter Wehner told the NYT, “and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”

Once again, let’s stipulate that the election marked a dramatic failure by Democrats. But they were hardly alone. Herewith a litany of the major fails of 2024:

The GOP normies and other squishes

We are here because the Republican Party surrendered to Donald Trump in every conceivable way. This was a choice, and it was not inevitable. Many of the GOP suck-ups will now be rewarded for sacrificing their principles and their integrity.

But what of the anti-Trump normies? The ones who kept telling themselves that they didn’t need to take a stand because there was no way Trump could ever win? They told themselves he couldn’t win the nomination; then they told themselves that he couldn’t ever win the election. Even the best of them — like Mitt Romney — thought they could stay relevant in a post-Trump party if they refused to endorse his opponent. Others who had first-hand knowledge of his reckless unfitness chose not to come forward because — they told themselves — surely others would take care of the problem for them.

Their defeat could hardly be more comprehensive; a condign fate for those who refused to take a stand when it might have counted.

The Justice System

History will record with a certain incredulity the utter failure of the criminal justice system (except for the hush money case) to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. Merrick Garland naively thought that he could dither and delay; and the Supreme Court put the lie to the illusion that no American is above the law.

Trump will now pardon many of the J6 rioters, and will quash all of the investigations into his crimes. When Richard Nixon fired Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre, it set off a firestorm that ended his presidency. When Trump fires Jack Smith, it will be met with a shrug.

The Media

Reports of the legacy media’s demise have not been exaggerated.

Trump broke American journalism; and it is likely to get worse as power and influence shifts toward platforms that honor algorithms more than truth.

**

And, finally, and most important of all:

The American Voters

They were warned.

As my friend Tom Nichols wrote late last month, “voters have everything they need to know about this election.” There were no excuses. They saw Trump in Full — in all his effulgent griminess and bigotry. He is an adjudicated rapist, a serial liar, fraudster, and a convicted felon. A seditionist who tried to overturn an election. A man described as a “total fascist” by his top general; a demagogue who peddled conspiracy theories and racist lies about migrants eating cats.

Voters, we are told, were upset about inflation, the border, and about “woke” politics.

But they were, apparently, not bothered by Trump’s crimes, his incoherent economic plans, his appeasement of Vladamir Putin, his embrace of a “rough hour” of police brutality, or the Great Replacement theory. Nor were they put off by Trump’s empowerment of an anti-vax nutjob like RFK, Jr., who may gut the nation’s health care safety net.

There are several possibilities here. Voters who backed Trump:

(1) Never heard any of this because they exist in an alternative reality

(2) Heard about it but didn’t believe it, because they preferred his lies

(3) Knew about his reckless dishonesty and bigotry, but didn’t care, or…

(4) Actually, liked it all.

**

I know that it is now unfashionable to criticize the wisdom and sagacity of American voters, but this ought not be sanewashed as a normal choice in a rational or sane democracy.³ When we are done flagellating other institutions, we need to admit the possibility that something is profoundly broken in the American psyche and character.

For decades we have told ourselves stories about American exceptionalism and leadership — a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world. And, indeed, we remain the world’s greatest superpower.

But we found out last week that we are a profoundly unserious country.

**

Back in April, in my first “To the Contrary” newsletter, I wrote about what was happening to the American mind and quoted from a piece I had written for the Atlantic:

Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

Postman was prophetic, but he couldn’t have had any idea how bad things would get in the age of Donald Trump and Twitter. Faced with Trump’s behavior, America’s norms of decency and truth proved to be far more fragile than many of us imagined.

Even though he could not have imagined the tsunami of nonsense, vitriol, and mind melting that have accompanied the Age of Trump and Elon Musk’s X, I don’t think Postman would be surprised to find that tens of millions of Americans are entertained rather than outraged by the predations of an absurdist clown like the GOP’s prospective nominee.

In other words: Our national idiocracy was a pre-existing condition just waiting for the coming of a cynical demagogue like Trump. Our guardrails and norms proved to be far more fragile than we imagined, because they had been hollowed out and dumbed down.

Here is where Postman’s insights are so valuable: We worry about fascism and Orwellian authoritarianism, but Postman argued that the real threat was more insidious.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, he suggested, was a more accurate prophecy of our time than George Orwell’s 1984. He wrote:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

**

Exit take: Maybe, just maybe, both of them were right. And we are about to live through what they merely imagined.

My French Dog

Actually, Zok belongs to my daughter and my grandsons. But we bonded last week. Here we are sitting near the entrance to Angouleme’s spectacular Comic Museum.

1. Of all the bullshit takes out there, this is the most moronic: “Democrats Begged Team Kamala Harris Not to Campaign With Liz Cheney.” (I’ll have more to say later.)

2. For example, I agree with this take by Ruy Teixeira: “The Shattering of the Democratic Coalition.”

The facts must be faced. The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose. It cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda at scale. The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.

There is a simple—and painful—reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap—and sometimes not at all—with those of ordinary Americans.

And this:

• “Harris's loss to Trump is a stinging verdict for the left”- The Washington Post

• “Kamala Harris Was Dukakis-ed.”

• “How Dems Can Start Staging a Comeback - Dan Pfeiffer”

• Yascha Mounk: “To understand how Trump could become the dominant politician of this era, it’s time for all of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror.”

• Matt Yglesias: “A tale of two machines: Democrats need to stop shrinking the tent.”

• Sahil Kapur:

  

• “Chris Cillizza: This one ad may have won Donald Trump the election.”

3. H. L. Mencken once quipped that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” We’re about to see how that works.