Yesterday things were unclear, and today things are all too clear.
Yesterday it looked as if Harris could win. On the evidence available to someone watching from England, there seemed no great enthusiasm for Trump either at his flagging under-attended rallies or elsewhere. There seemed no reason to believe he would do better than four years ago (or two years ago with his endorsed candidates).
But against that view was a sense of apprehension, if not doom. For, as this blog also averred, one could also too easily imagine Trump winning. Not because one could point to ‘factors’ (as a certain type of historian would put it), but just because he could – especially in this age of extreme political volatility.
And he has.
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One trick of the human mind is to place shape and form onto events which at the time were uncertain, and so those who were themselves unclear as to what was about to happen tend to deftly switch to being very clear about what went wrong – and who was to blame.
From the perspective of this liberal constitutionalist blog the only points that seem worth making at this stage is about how the electoral system (at least in the United States but also elsewhere) is inefficient in certain respects.
Viz:
A candidate was a liar, known to be a liar and could easily be shown to be liar – but people voted for that candidate anyway.
A candidate was a convicted fraudster – but people voted for that candidate anyway.
A candidate was by any meaningful definition an insurrectionist – but people voted for that candidate anyway.
And a candidate was in the views of some serious people a fascist – but people voted for that candidate anyway.
This means that there is no point, in and of itself, showing a candidate to be a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist if people do not actually care if that candidate is a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist.
And so if the outputs of a media-political system of accountability – such as that offered by the lengthy US presidential campaign – do not gain purchase or traction, then the question is what is the purpose of a system of accountability.
The view that once a candidate is shown to be [X] then that would be enough for voters to not support that candidate falls apart when voters, knowing the candidate is [X], do not care.
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What is the solution to this problem?
Perhaps there is no solution. As a Victorian politician once said to an earnest colleague: do you really believe there are solutions to political problems?
(One day I will track down that quotation.)
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But a step towards a solution is to understand the nature of the problem.
The old media-political model of accountability – the Woodward and Bernstein model, if you will – is not working when you have a shameless candidate clapped and cheered by nod-along supporters.
And it is not a problem that is going to go away.
Yes, Trump is exceptionally charismatic – it is difficult to image a DeSantis or a Vance carrying a campaign like Trump. As such it is tempting to see him as a one-off and to just wait for him to go and for normality to return.
But there will be other Trumps, especially as the old gatekeepers in political parties and mainstream media fall away, and as illiberals become more adept at exploiting mass social media.
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The one book which seems pertinent to all this originated in (of all years) 1984.
This was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – a book which should be better known.
His son wrote this brilliant short essay about that book and Trump in 2017, a lot which still stands today.
His son said:
“I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did not. He saw his job as identifying a serious, under-addressed problem, then asking a set of important questions about the problem. He knew it would be hard to find an easy answer to the damages wrought by “technopoly”. It was a systemic problem, one baked as much into our individual psyches as into our culture.”
His son then put forward some possible solutions. You may think of others. I cannot think of any.
How do you have accountability when people care not for the accounts that they are given?
When people know they are being lied to, but do not care?
I have no idea.
The only conclusion I have is that it is time for a good cup of tea.
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I’ve just lost a bet with myself. I was expecting a different two words (to be precise, a repetition of one word) to end this post…
Not well.
My feeling is that it is currently as impossible to elect a female POTUS as it is to amend the Constitution, because there are simply too many angry gullible men who are afraid of having all their advantages taken away. If Trump is seen as the answer, then we cannot be asking the right question.
Agree absolutely. While perceived problems with the economy and immigration damaged the Democrats, it seems that, for the present, the average white, testosterone-fulled, gun-loving adult male republican voter holds the key to electing the POTUS.
It’s the “wisdom of the crowd” but in reverse – people will largely go along with things that are repeated often enough provided that there are no adverse consequences to them.
The kicker in politics is that there rarely are. Because the adverse consequences mostly happen at a level that is not directly visible or, if it is visible, it is easy to misunderstand why it is happening. So, in the UK, the Environment Agency was an easy target of cuts in 2010-2015 because it didn’t seem to do anything. And now our rivers are full of crap. But the people who cut the agency funding don’t get prosecuted for it or even publicly shamed (not that that means much any more.)
In the US, Elon Musk and RFK jr. are boasting about how they will dismantle entire departments because they don’t seem to do anything (other than get in the way.) And they won’t pay any sort of price when the system eventually collapses.
There was a recurring theme in interviews with voters who despised Trump, yet found Harris unacceptable because she was perceived to be far left, socialist, Communist, etc. She’s none of those things, but wasn’t able to convince undecided voters otherwise. Trumps slurs and insults won the day.
It’s bizarre that they’d rather have a criminal as president than a liberal.
“This means that there is no point, in and of itself, showing a candidate to be a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist if people do not actually care if that candidate is a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist.”
And rapist. Don’t forget rapist.
Thank you, David.
Today is a pretty bleak day and your commentary is helpful. We have a ringside seat to watch the next 4 years unfold. I wish we didn’t.
This tweet by an American, shortly before Trump crossed over the 270 threshold, I believe sums it up well. https://x.com/LakerFan1234000/status/1854017083807346740 … really good (sic) job guys The world now waits in expectation of uncontrolled chaos exceeding that of 2016-2020.
God knows how we get out of all this, but I thought your piece and the references in it really interesting. Thank you
According to ChatGPT (so take a pinch of salt), the quote “Do you really believe there are solutions to political problems?”… is attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce, an American philosopher and logician. In his 1877 essay “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce explores various methods of settling opinion, including the method of tenacity, which involves adhering to one’s initial beliefs despite contrary evidence. He critiques this approach, suggesting that it leads to ignoring opposing information and others’ views, as if truth were intrinsically private rather than public. (Wikipedia)
I have been thinking for some time about why all the leadership books I have read, and all the processes I have seen that have claimed to assess leadership skills, have been wrong.
I have concluded that people will follow someone if either (a) they believe by doing so some objective important to them is more likely to be achieved, or (b) they believe the person represents values that are important to them.
I have reached the view that everything else is irrelevant – it doesn’t matter if the leader has failed on many occasions to deliver their promises, or if they have clearly lied.
As long as people believe in either (a) or (b) they will follow the leader.
Clearly not every leader will appeal to every person but if the leader can, no matter how objectionable they may appear to some, attract sufficient followers that is all that matters.
What we can do about I do not know – beyond trying to first understand why the leader’s values or stated aims attract so many people. Perhaps having a really nice cup of tea is as good a response as any.
The quotation sounds like Disraeli. I look forward to you finding the source.
On the bigger picture, we are all a bit stuffed. It is hard to see a way for liberal democracy to survive in a world where people can’t agree on facts and explain away or just blank out facts that don’t fit their arguments (like Trump being an insurrectionist, or voting for the other side being acceptable).
I recall it being in the context of either Disraeli or Lord Randolph Churchill. One day I will find it again.
We have to do whatever we can to uphold the values of trustworthiness and truth. I have started by submitting a formal complaint to Channel 4 about their decision to have Boris Johnson on their election night programme. Charlatans like him with a long record of telling lies should be media pariahs, no matter how many people still find them entertaining. If lots of people do this, it might have some effect, and at any rate we’ll feel better.
Plenty of commentators will be sifting the ashes of this bonfire from now until historical perspective makes a definitive judgment. Many will opine on the electoral system deficiencies, because they exist, many will highlight the lack of news-media accountability for lies, distortions and corruption, because it is lacking.
Some will follow your list of possible causes but I’d like to suggest one which appears conclusive to me but also appears to be unpalatable or unmentionable in most liberal circles because too many people wish to be thought of as polite rather than accurate or right; stupidity.
None of the list of reasons you mention that Trump should have been rejected for the post would have been ignored if enough people were reasonably sensible. Anyone can have a difference of opinion on some topics but surely a majority of people in a society should recognise the danger of lies, criminality and repeated corrution in elected office? That shouldn’t be too high a bar to set for us all to live together, should it?
As the great philosopher Zappa wrote; ‘Scientists believe that the universe is made of hydrogen because they claim it’s the most plentiful ingredient. I claim that the most plentiful ingredient is stupidity.’
And more worryingly he wondered whether this may be happening in front of our eyes;”Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they’re smart that amazes me. It’s baffling whenever you find someone who’s smart – incredible. Soon you’ll have zoos for such things.”
The implication being that the insightful, informed and sensible discussions that this blog and many, many other sources provide at the moment will become a vanishing commodity unless we grapple with the stupidity on display.
I guess it’s like Brexit ..17 different reasons .. so solution is to get out of the bubble .. what use is Taylor Swift and Beyoncé endorsements to a single mum working long hours with nothing to show for it after decades … what use to young men … the more “ woke” democrats became the more votes they lost … pundits will pretend to be shocked upset even but actually Trump much better for their gig than boring Kamala … meanwhile the poor carry on
So… there is one possible answer: time.
Populism, media manipulation and money in politics are not new, even if recent technology has super-charged them. The world has been weathering these nasty phenomena for centuries.
And democracies since the age of Athens have been withering and decaying – history is full of examples, most recently Nazism and the Holocaust, which grew directly out of the impeccably democratic Weimar Republic.
But what happened as a result of that catastrophe? In short: we learned a lesson.
We fought a terrible war to defeat the Nazis, in which millions died. Then, with Europe lying in ruins, we set out to stop such a thing ever happening again: we created a series of international institutions designed to hold governments in check and encourage democracy, we developed human rights law and gave it teeth, in many ways we asserted the values of freedom which ultimately saw off a totalitarian superpower and avoided nuclear war. We tried to build a new culture of mutual respect between nations that resided only in part on brute strength.
And with all this, we arguably bought ourselves 70 years of peace, in Europe at least.
But the generations rise and fall, and memories fade. The pendulum swings. The old demons creep back. The grim realities of war – at least for most European and American voters – are forgotten. The populists rediscover the fatal power of lies. The Beast – as Yeats so vividly put it – is always trying to “slouch towards Bethlehem to be born”.
But if things again go wrong, as many predict, the millions of Americans who have (more or less democratically) chosen Donald Trump as their President will be forced to learn their lesson too.
One way or another they will come to understand that choosing a criminal, a liar and a proto-fascist to lead them is not in their longer-term interest.
Will it take another global war – or some other terrible apocalypse – to bring this home to them? Who knows, but ultimately they will have to re-learn what our grandparents knew – and what those living today in Ukraine and the Middle East know.
All it will take – as the pendulum of history swings once again through its grim arc – is time.
GS; But what happened as a result of that catastrophe? In short: we learned a lesson.
The accuracy of this picture has appeal but isn’t that price too high? Can we not find another way as a species to learn these lessons from the past without it costing millions of lives and decades of suffering and damage? Only for the pendulum to swing back again and erase the progress?
“But if things again go wrong, as many predict, the millions of Americans who have (more or less democratically) chosen Donald Trump as their President will be forced to learn their lesson too.”
America will suffer less for this than the rest of the world. What lesson can we learn from this and put into practice? What might have really destroyed America once and for all was a Harris victory that was not accepted, and every indication was that it would not have been.
As for everyone else:
– Ukraine will lose and become part of Russia.
– I have know idea what will happen in Israel.
– Probably NATO will collapse.
– Possibly the UN will collapse.
– Russian and Chinese influence will continue to ascend.
For some time I’ve been coming to terms with a belief that liberal democracy may not really be sustainable. I wonder whether China actually has the right idea. We’ll probably find out one way or another.
No, a great majority of them will blame the ‘stupid, commie, lying, corrupt, witch-hunting Lefties’.
I think you are pretty much right, the shelf life of political lessons is limited and memories seem to be growing ever shorter. Awful as it looks to see this written down, I have often wondered since Jan 6 whether the lesson would have been learned much quicker had the mob actually managed to hang Mike Pence that day, on the assumption (too dangerous?) that Biden would still have been able to take office despite that.
Thank you for that, I actually feel slightly better, to have someone so wise acknowledge that there is nothing much that could have been done to change the outcome … meanwhile my brain is still screaming ‘why don’t people care?’ The tea is brewing now.
“Yes, Trump is exceptionally charismatic – it is difficult to image a DeSantis or a Vance carrying a campaign like Trump. As such it is tempting to see him as a one-off and to just wait for him to go and for normality to return.”
He is fading but we’ll have Elon Musk running the world!
My resolution now is to stop subscribing to USA papers and admit I really do not understand American people.
Cup of tea to calm nerves great idea too.
Thanks for the sobriety of this post and the reminder of that excellent essay. Political solutions are always problems waiting to be applied, perhaps it’s for the best we can no longer pretend the systemic flaws in our versions of democracy can be brushed under the carpet.
This mess will straighten itself out, somehow, perhaps over a couple of generations, as people once again learn to value truth. Disaster in April of 1945 helped people in Germany to wake up and face reality. Some large set of public troubles, with climate change and a dollar collapse prominent among them, might ultimately perform the same job for America. Meanwhile, we in the UK and the EU do well to brew strong, black Darjeeling.
Somewhere on YouTube I saw a video that comprised a textual analysis of Trumpspeak vs Kalamaspeak. He uses shorter sentences and easier words…endlessly repeated. ““Included in this repetition are assertions that might have once been true (high inflation for example) but no longer are. Others that are clearly nonsense but the truth takes longer. And his behaviour does not condescend to the rule of law; in fact it aims to undermine it. All this is hard for a westcoast liberal lawyer to counter. The field of play is different and the referees are schooled by the ideas of the leader and not the rules of the game.
It’s more than the electorate simply not caring. They were positively drawn to somebody who was like them. Inarticulate, ignorant, avaricious, dishonest – I could go on at length but will have to stop. Well I should add a deep misunderstanding of science and what it is, and that’s going to suffer horribly. Some people say “I don’t really understand science”, with a kind of pride, and I fear for the expected proliferation of this attitude. The US school system has a lot to answer for.
It isn’t ignorance and many of Trump’s supporters are articulate. Even the most intelligent can be manipulated. The US education system may not be great, but it isn’t the reason people voted for Trump.
The most frustrating thing I saw was people saying they didn’t like Trump, but still preferred to vote for him and not for a liberal.
Don’t think anyone has mentioned the rather obvious: Kamala is a mixed race woman from California. America is a misogynistic and racist country.
I believe it is to do with the age of empires. As each empire rises and then falls; they do it in an ever shortening time scale. The Roman Empire lasted, 600 or so years, the British Empire about one half of that, the “American” Empire has lasted 70 years, how long will the next empire, the Chinese Empire perhaps last? 30 -40 Years?
Hello from the person who got it so wrong in the comments what now feels a lifetime ago. By which I mean the oligarchy won. That said, to try to keep to the theme today, I don’t purport to have the answer, if there is one. But I think we can draw a couple of inferences. First, wealth inequality enables an oligarchy to control the narrative in striking ways (to add to Amusing Ourselves… consider Putnam’s Bowling Alone). Second, uncodified norms are not worth the paper they are not written on. One last thing: if people feel alienated from a system (see #1) then it may not be possible to avoid a bad (irrational) outcome because no one feels invested in rules or the thinking behind them. If any representative, rules based system is to work in a large country, it will require a great deal more instruction as to its workings – it is far too complex to be left vulnerable to the siren song of “less red tape”.
On a personal note, as a US “citizen” I can say that despite it looking – and feeling – as if we have just hit ourselves in the head with a hammer, many folks here will continue to work toward something better.
Or do you think Trump is a one-off, or has the US system somehow bred someone like him? It follows that I then want to say if there is anyone like him as in fact it feels to me in the UK that he is a one-off albeit the system has facilitated him.