When Trump won in November 2016, I was inclined to see it as a fluke. (Hillary was a terrible candidate, so I figured Democrats stayed home in large numbers, and a lot of right wingers decided Trump was the lesser of two evils.) I also figured that our institutions were strong enough that Trump wouldn't be able to get away with anything blatantly unconstitutional before he was impeached.
I was wrong on both counts. It appears that among the Republican voters, (particularly among white evangelicals) Trump genuinely has a strong base. This is the new political reality, and this needs to be reckoned with.
Trumps voters are not the numerical majority. (Hillary won the popular vote, after all.) But because of the way the electoral college system is set up, they are the electoral majority.
So, in order to change the calculation, what needed to happen? We see a lot of outrage in the streets nowadays, but this passion isn't necessarily going to lead to victory in November. We already had a lot of passion in 2016. We don't need to be increasing our passion, we need to be increasing our converts.
Now, this is all anecdotal, but based just on my Facebook feed, all the conservative evangelicals I'm in touch with are not getting converted. In fact, the more passion and outrage they are seeing on the left, the more they are digging in their heels and retreating into their own world of conservative memes and fake news. (See also Whisky Prajer: Research vs. "Research")
Every day when I log into Facebook, I come very close to losing my patience with these people. "You people are so stupid!" I want to yell. (A couple times I've written, and then deleted a Facebook post complaining about all the general stupidity and gullibility I see regularly displayed on conservative Facebook.)
But here's the thing: it doesn't do any good to get angry about it. And it also doesn't do any good to claim the moral high ground on this (even though that feels emotional satisfying).
Here's the only calculation that matters: Trump won the electoral college in 2016. In order to beat Trump in 2020, we needed to have decreased the polarization and started converting Trump supporters over to our cause. Instead, the polarization has increased.
It was always a mistake to demonize Trump supporters, and increase the rhetoric of Political Correctness on the Left. Instead, what we needed to say to them was: "Join us. A better world is possible, and you can be part of it."
(And yes, if you look through my Twitter feed and blogposts from the past 4 years, I'm as much a part of the problem as anyone. I've also given into feelings of anger over the past 4 years, and I'll own that.)
Keep in mind that in times of political polarization, the President doesn't need to unite the country. The smartest option for Trump at this point is to increase polarization, and then rely on his base to get so angry at the Democrats that they aren't tempted to cross party lines and vote for Biden. It worked for Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972. And it worked for Bush in 2004. And it worked for Trump in 2016.
That, plus Joe Biden has got to be the most uninspiring candidate I can remember in my lifetime. So that's trouble as well.
All that being said, keep in mind that all of my predictions- have - been - wrong - so far, so I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this as well.
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A couple weeks ago, I made the following joke on my Facebook page:
There's chaos in the streets, and the country is even more polarized than it was 4 years ago. At least the good news is there's no way Nixon could ever get re-elected to a second term now.Yep, I'm still standing by this analogy.
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I've made all these same points on this blog 3 years ago. I know it's bad form to plug your own posts, but I was re-reading my old post from January 2017 Thoughts On the Anti-Trump Protests and Thoughts on a Way Forward and I feel like it's just as relevant now as it was then. So although I'm tempted to write more here about how self-defeating the left's rhetoric has been over the past few years, I feel like I already said all this back in January 2017, so I'm just going to leave this post here, and encourage you to re-visit my earlier post for a fuller explanation of my thoughts.
Addendum:
I never got a reply to this, but this exchange from a year ago has stuck in my mind, because it seems to be illustrative of the problem:
If "we shouldn't put children in cages" can't appeal to their humanity and "we shouldn't nuke hurricanes" can't appeal to their intelligence, then it's time to admit that Trump voters cannot now or ever be reasoned with.— Faith Naff #BlackLivesMatter (@FaithNaff) August 27, 2019
Good point. I guess there's nothing left to do but just let them win again in 2020.— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) August 28, 2019
It's very easy to just throw up our hands in despair, but if some of those Trump voters can't be convinced to change their minds in 2020, then we can expect a repeat of the last election.— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) August 28, 2019
Well ... thanks for the shout-out. Altho like you I am very anxious to be proven wrong on this matter. And I think your earlier analysis is spot-on. There's no invitation being extended right now -- by anyone!
ReplyDeleteBack in the late-80s the university I attended was a small one (U of Winnipeg -- it's freakin' huge now). When a visiting prof came to give a general lecture all manner of students showed up, no matter what the topic was. A feminist prof gave a lecture, and opened the floor for questions. A student asked, "What is the role of men in the feminist movement?"
She said, "I don't think it's possible for a man to be feminist."
I looked at all the fellas that had shown up for this and thought, you've just made the fight harder than it needs to be. And that's fine if it's your fight. But if you're fighting for others too, then you need allies -- the more the merrier, so to speak.
Anyway. I'm just repeating you now! Imitation sincerest form of flatter, etc. Be well, Joel.
Thanks for the comment. Here's hoping we're both wrong. (Stranger things have happened, so we can hope, huh?)
ReplyDeleteGranted as the right wing is getting more and more irrational, it's getting harder and harder to dialogue with them. But people don't seem to understand that dialogue is the only way forward.
There was an exchange I got into with someone on Twitter a year ago where I thought this point was relevant. Let me see if I can dig that up and add that as an addendum.
I am wondering if our political discourse has, in fact, changed as much as we seem to believe. "You can't reason with 'em" is an accusation as old as humanity, and to be fair it is often true -- of the extremists on both sides. I think one element that might be different from years gone by is the degree of virtue signalling. I mean, even the nomenclature is recent -- in the past you could "tub-thump" or more likely than not just paste a bumper-sticker on your car and be done with it. People who disagreed knew better than to engage politically with someone who had "Nixon: now more than ever" on their Chevy's bumper.
ReplyDeleteThese days nobody puts anything on their bumpers. But every morning on Facebook or Twitter it's a parade of BOLD, OBVIOUS STATEMENTS THAT ANYONE WITH COMMON SENSE WILL ACKNOWLEDGE! It's like we've switched from carefully placing a demure "Question everything" or "Co-exist" or "Nixon Now" on the family Escort to buying an old ice-cream truck covered with political harangues. In this environment the person who keeps their own counsel is an unnoticed rarity.
Well, now you've got me thinking...
ReplyDeleteWhat is unique about our current situation?
Fake news (at least the extent of it and the reach of it) is new, and the extent to which social media echo chambers is new.
The extent to which the mainstream media has been devalued as a mutual source of information for both the left and the right is I think at a new extreme... although complaints about the "liberal media" date back to at least the 1990s (and before?)
The extent to which the President himself is participating in the polarizing rhetoric is new--or at least the way he's being blatant about it. (Nixon benefited from the polarization, but Nixon at least used coded language and pretended he was above the fray.)
But the essence of the polarization--the tribalism, and everything that goes with tribalism, may be as old as time.
Yeah, I'm with you on all those points. Also: the internet. There has never been any shortage of kooks throwing out "alternative" theories to the predominant ones in the MSM, but what they lacked was a means of distribution. You could only print so many Jack Chick (to take just a mild example) pamphlets. Now everyone has a global bullhorn at their disposal and there is no saying who might become the next feverish meme in the democratic "discussion."
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking over things recently--about this discussion and about all the time I spend on Facebook/twitter/ blog arguing politics.
ReplyDeleteIt seemed to me back when I was in college in the 1990s that political discussions were about arguing rational ideas. Now, it just seems all about tribalism.
I think the conclusion you and I have come to is that tribalism was always a big element, but it's increased to an even bigger element over the past 20 years.
I've been thinking over my own political conversion process (from Young Conservative to Young Liberal--which happened from about the ages of 16-19). I used to imagine this conversion as a process of logical thinking and rejecting the inherent logical problems with the conservatism of my upbringing. But more and more I'm thinking what I really did is just transfer my allegiance from one tribe to another tribe. (It seemed like all the cool people were liberals). And then created a fiction about rational arguments that I used to justify it.
With all the political intensity of the last few days, I think I've exhausted myself getting into fruitless Facebook arguments. I think I'm going to try and go politics free on my social media for a while. We'll see how long I can keep it up.