Many folks writing post-mortems on what’s been dubbed ‘the presidential election of our time’ are sure to follow us at Braver Angels on all social media platforms in the coming days. Republicans are puffed up and feeling vindicated in the case they and their President-Elect Trump made during the campaign, particularly given the comfortable margins they secured in the House and Senate. They Republicans are seeing the outcome as giving them a mandate to govern as they choose. The Democrats, meanwhile, are finding themselves back on their heels, poleaxed by the Republicans’ decisive victory in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Nobody seems to have seen that coming.
I have my own thoughts about what went wrong, or at least some of it, for the Democrats. Too many years doubling down on pushing the identity politics narratives of victimhood for the various minority groups, racial and otherwise, that make up the party’s left, which led to what some feel as muzzling of free speech and freedom of thought, especially on college campuses and the failed ‘equity and inclusion’ programs practiced by many companies. A reputation, deserved or not, as the party of elites (despite the record spending by the billionaire Elon Musk on Trump’s campaign.) There’s the public distrust in government and institutions, bred by the gross missteps and overreach of the pandemic response. There’s what some, like Senator Bernie Sanders, describe as the party’s walking away from the working class, and there’s bread-and-butter issues like gas and grocery prices. While the economy has been doing well and the U.S. has brought down inflation faster than other nations, many Americans seem not to be feeling it this election season, and were in no mood to listen to anyone telling them things were otherwise.
There’s the handling or as some saw it ‘mishandling’ of the immigration issue by the current administration. There’s the toxically polarizing issue of abortion, used by both the left and right to energize their base to the point some pundits have speculated that neither party can afford to give the issue up. Perhaps Vice-President Harris’s gender and race factored in as well, no doubt for some voters, despite other countries’ having had some of their best leaders be women. And, of course, there’s the fact we Americans, red and blue, are watching different media, operating in our silos and listening to pundits who make their living keeping us angry and divided—and that is happening on both sides of the political spectrum.
I’m not talking about the minority on the right who were very likely motivated by the racial animus of Trump’s rhetoric. I’m talking about the everyday people who looked at the choices and said “I don’t like Trump but I’m voting for him anyway.”
America in 2024 is a complicated place. Even while we elected Donald Trump to the White House, according to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion rights measures that were on the ballot this November passed in seven states, including in Arizona and Montana. Kansas has a female governor, while California never has had one. Many farmers believe in climate change, utilize technology to manage their crops, and go to college to study ‘ag(riculture)’.
Take a look at the demographic breakdown of Trump’s voters, and it becomes even clearer that America is a complicated place. According to an NBC News demographic, 54 % of Hispanic men voted for Trump as did 20% of Black men. Following the election, I heard interviews of Hispanic immigrants who said they don’t like that they themselves followed the immigration rules to gain legal citizenship, while other immigrants cheated the system. They seemed not to have been put off by Trump’s campaign promise to deport some 11 million illegal immigrants.
If the only lesson the political left or any of us takes away from this election, is the simplistic assumptions of yore—for example, that anyone voting for Trump must be a racist—then we will have missed the point. We’ve been sinking into a morass of division for years. What if we took this opportunity instead to throw out the old assumptions, upend them, and change the game? Could that be our way out? What would be the appeal of any would-be autocrat if everyday people didn’t feel disenfranchised, like no one was listening to their concerns, and instead of feeling that the old presumptions about anyone’s identity based on some immutable characteristics were no longer being used against them?
Change is inevitable but also difficult. America has experienced rapid change in the last few decades, not only technological change but massive cultural change. We seem not to be very good at helping people adjust, giving them a safe means to grieve some of our culture which is passing away. If things were better for some, at least imagined to be so, in times past, who is anyone to say their experience of their own lives is invalid? Life no doubt was better for some and much worse for others at different times in history. Both can be true at once. Would it be terrible if we helped them grieve it? Difficult emotions like grief and anger don’t magically disappear or resolve themselves. To deny them is to invite them to manifest in ways most of us wouldn’t choose, like in political violence.
When Benjamin Franklin famously said “a Republic, if you can keep it,” I don’t think he was referring to outside forces posing a danger. If we can’t figure out how to get along with people we strongly disagree with, who may not share our religious beliefs, look like us or live the way we do, whose values may be different than our own based on where we choose to live or the cultural in which we grew up, we will prove the old maxim, that democracies never have a lifespan of more than three hundred years. By that measure, we are on the way out.
If we don’t manage to keep our democratic republic, we will have done it to ourselves; and if we figure out how to keep it, we will have accomplished something no other nation ever has – kept together one nation knitting together peoples of many faiths and backgrounds. What a feat.
In the words of Winston Churchill “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” Let us begin.
Monica Rockwell is a member of Braver Angels and a routine contributor to BA’s community essays.
