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election 2024
The Democratic Party Is Toast If It Doesn’t Earn Back the Trust of the Working Class
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner by consistently naming and picking visible fights with powerful culprits.
Nov 22, 2024
A week before the election, my dad was visiting and talked to me about his gut feeling that former U.S. President Donald Trump might win. He was clear about his choice to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “But what are they doing?” he asked me, exasperated.
“They need to level with people about the economy,” he continued. “I know so many people who can’t afford a place to live any more. People do not want to hear, ‘Well, actually the economy is good.’”
Then suddenly he pivoted away from Harris to liberals more generally, and away from the economy into culture.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports.
“You know, another thing: I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”
At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are.
My father would never dehumanize and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites—the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party.
Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for—and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership.
He doesn’t feel like they give a damn about people like him. I’m disinclined to try to persuade him otherwise. Because it’s clear as day that if Democratic Party leaders could swap the party’s historic base of working-class voters for more affluent voters and still win elections, they would.
This is not hyperbole. This is what they have shown us and told us over and over again—in their policy priorities, messaging choices, and electoral campaigns. They say it out loud. In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024.
And even when it appeared to work in 2018, 2020, and 2022, when Democrats won over sufficient numbers of suburban defectors, harnessing a momentous backlash against Trump, the risks were apparent.
In a little-noticed April 2018 post on the election analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, analyst Nathaniel Rakich showed how, at that time, “on average (and relative to partisan lean), Democrats [were] doing better in working-class areas than in suburban ones.”
Rakich showed that Democrats had roughly similar odds of winning over working-class voters as they did affluent voters and that they would likely see some positive results no matter which set of voters they invested resources into reaching.
But Rakich warned that such positive results could be self-reinforcing: If Democrats invested only in winning affluent suburban voters, those efforts would produce some results, and this would bolster Democrats’ resolve that they had chosen wisely. Schumer’s strategy would seem to be validated. But what about the working-class voters who weren’t prioritised?
Three years later, in March 2021, Republican Representative Jim Banks sent a strategy memo to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, arguing that the Republican Party had become “the party supported by most working-class voters.” Banks advocated that the GOP should explicitly embrace this realignment to “permanently become the Party of the Working Class.”
Banks wasn’t using “working class” as a euphemism for white working class. The memo pointed to movement of lower-income Black and Latino voters to Trump from 2016 to 2020 at numbers that should have seriously alarmed Democrats.
A striking feature of the memo is the thinness of its proposed policy solutions to attract working-class voters. While it suggests calling out “economic elitism,” it identifies the villains supposedly responsible for working-class grievances as immigrants, China, and “woke college professors.” Big Tech is called out only because of its “egregious suppression of conservative speech.”
The GOP’s actual policy agenda—from weakening unions to deregulation to lowering taxes on the wealthy to further gutting of public education and more—is a disaster for working-class people.
But a head-to-head comparison of policy agendas is not how most voters make up their minds about which candidate to back. Most Americans are struggling, with a large majority living paycheck to paycheck. In such a context, Trump’s core competency is his intuitive read of popular discontent. His central message boils down to: “I will wreak havoc on the elites who have wreaked havoc on our country.”
While Trump and Republicans are diametrically opposed to progressive economic policies, Trump excels at naming culprits. He’s adept at consistently tapping into generalized “anti-elite” anger and resentment, typically weaving it together with racial prejudice, xenophobia, misogyny, and—especially in 2024—transphobia.
Ambiguous anti-elitism—again, focused primarily on cultural elites—is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians.
It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.
And let’s be honest, affluent liberals can be incredibly condescending. Vulnerable groups are targeted in part to tell a story that “Kamala Harris cares more about catering to this special group (that you harbour prejudice against) than she cares about hard-working people like you.”
Before you go throwing trans people or immigrants or anyone else under the bus (because MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said we should), consider the possibility that these attacks are weak sauce when compared with the popular appeal Democrats could have if they decided to consistently name more compelling villains.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports. Trump’s manoeuvre to misdirect resentment only works when Democrats refuse to tell a compelling story that makes sense of working-class voters’ real grievances.
But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that [Bernie Sanders’] reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate.
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket.
Even as President Joe Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust.
The reality is that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish—and what more they attempted to do—primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way.
Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal.
Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.
Banks’ strategy memo told Democrats exactly how Trump and the GOP would win in 2024, and then they proceeded to do it.
So when can we read the strategy memo for how Democrats intend to stop the bleed of working-class voters and win them back?
We’ve had the framework in our hands for as long as we’ve had Trump. It’s easy to find. Google: “Bernie Sanders.”
By circling the wagons to defeat Sanders (twice), the Democratic Party establishment imagined it was making itself more palatable to highly prized affluent swing voters. But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that this reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate. Even The New York Times’ “moderate” columnist David Brooks finally gets it now.
It should now be abundantly clear that if Democrats do not learn to speak to and earn the trust of working-class people like my father—and people who are far more alienated than him—the party is toast. That means standing up visibly and vocally for working people and picking open fights with powerful culprits. Ultimately, it means confronting and reversing the central crisis underlying the “populist moment” we live in—runaway inequality—by delivering big for America’s working class.
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Trump’s Victory Is a Despicable Reflection of the American Character
More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.
Nov 21, 2024
Reelecting the Insurrectionist who provoked the January 6 attack is a monumental dereliction of civic duty by the American people. Donald Trump was provided a plurality mandate—enough of a match for him to burn America down.
The electorate affirmed that the worst human being to hold the presidency deserves a second turn in the job. Despite Trump being eight years older and obviously losing his mind; despite the fact that he ran a corrosive campaign on naked malevolence; and despite his having promised to mass arrest, cage, and deport immigrants, Americans rewarded him with ultimate power.
Toward the end of the 2024 election, the candidates made their closing arguments. Trump painted the United States as a dark, terrifying and infested place, festering with pet-eating immigrants, violent criminals, and deviant trans people. America was a savage hellscape where good, “normal” Americans were forgotten as their white, heterosexual world was reshaped by Democrats into something alien and repulsive.
In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us.
Trump stoked conspiracy theories and promised vengeance. He mused about reporters being shot, mimed oral sex with a microphone, spewed racist lies, and threatened to order the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself. None of this prevented his popularity from expanding in multiple electorates across the country; it may have even facilitated his success.
Vice President Kamala Harris articulated a hopeful future. Positioning herself as a moderate, Harris expressed a willingness to work with her political opponents. She embraced diversity and promised to better the lives of all Americans. The electorate was offered a choice between a mainstream Democrat and a candidate running the most openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president. They chose the latter.
Voters who cast their ballots for Trump engaged in contemptible behavior, turning amoral, unserious about governing, and proving themselves undeserving of our constitutional legacy. More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.
Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be minimized as the result of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the successful con of 100,000 voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters decisively chose Trump. The autocrat, who has grown more belligerent and maniacal over the years, is now is a maniac with a mandate.
Time and again, we hear the wild lies Trump‘s voters believe, such as babies being aborted after birth. We act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. The media often portrays this gullible crowd as woefully misunderstood: If only Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. That’s a myth no one should believe. They are not congenitally ignorant. They chose to close their eyes to reality.
Autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant, a liar. If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was terrible, then Harris was the right candidate. With a long career as a prosecutor, she’s taken on perpetrators of all kinds: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “I know Donald Trump’s type.” She was the prosecutor who would defeat the felon. The voters heard her case, and they found for the defendant. America knew his type, too, and liked it.
Many thought women would rise up in defense of bodily autonomy. And they did, but not enough. Abortion was less of a key issue than expected. Harris did win the support of 54% of women, lower than President Joe Biden’s 57% in 2020. No group of voters was more loyal to Trump than white men. He managed to drive up what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base. Male voters—terrified or resentful of women—bought into Trump’s regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright.
Despite enthusiastic crowds and the endorsement of high profile celebrities, antagonism or apathy undermined Harris: Over 7 million Biden voters did not vote for her. Trump likely won as a result. Currently, Harris has received 74 million votes, while Biden obtained over 81 million votes. Some may have even voted for Trump, who increased his 2020 vote total by over 2 million, up to 76 million. The anti-Trump coalition failed to sustain their 2020 outrage. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Julia Roberts lost to Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Joe Rogan.
Voting in 2020 was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Though Joe Biden provoked little passion, his campaign felt like the culmination of a liberation movement. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, was blunted for Harris. In a 2016 essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” Masha Gessen wrote, “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock and outrage,” otherwise apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the weather.
Defusing Trump outrage and hanging over the election was the festering political wound that was Democratic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The slaughter and starvation of Palestinians—funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media—has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction, some voted for Jill Stein, many stayed home.
Harris loyally lined up behind the despicable and unpopular blank-check policy of Biden, which demoralized the party’s base and threatened its chances in Michigan. As the carnage continued and expanded, furious Arab American and Muslim voters determined to punish the party by making it lose. It appears to have worked: Trump captured Michigan partly thanks to a shocking, winning margin in Dearborn, the largest majority Arab-American city.
Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians, nor those of most Americans. It’s no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported Trump over Kamala Harris. He held off on any cease-fire deal that might help Harris. Trump supported Israel’s brutal bombing campaigns in both Lebanon and Gaza and told his buddy Netanyahu ”do what you have to do.” As a “gift” to the incoming Trump administration, Netanyahu is preparing a cease-fire plan regarding its bombing of Lebanon.
Along with recriminations about Harris’s failure to at least express more remorse about the suffering in Gaza, a profusion of Democratic self-flagellation began immediately after the brutal loss. The party was too woke. Harris—the candidate who had been a magnet for joyful enthusiasm—was disparaged. She was too centrist, too un-primaried, too female, and laughed too often. She leaned too much on reproductive freedom, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration.
Democrats whined further: If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw, or if only he hadn’t mumbled something about “garbage.” Pundits opined furiously and confusingly: The campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men—or was it women? Also, Harris failed to talk enough about the kitchen-table economy and failed to address the many grievances of the working class, who are not getting their share and fear “urban” crime.
Maybe there’s a little truth in some of that, but none of it explains the magnitude of what’s happened. Despite being the best-fed, richest, and most lethally defended humans in the history of planet Earth, Americans are afraid. Despite being coddled with too much of everything: more cars, more good roads, more personal gadgets, more guns, and more freedom than any country in the world, it’s not enough. Americans are annoyed. The price of eggs went up. Gas doesn’t cost what it cost in 1989. Did America elect a dictator because Cheerios—available in about 20 flavors—hit $5.29 at the grocery store?
Americans reelected a Bigot who promotes hatred and division and who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public. They chose a man described by his own former advisers as a fascist. Voters witnessed his abuse of presidential power toward fascist ends and understood that returning him to office will immunize him legally for those abuses. Their votes affirm that conspiring to disenfranchise Americans by overturning a national election does not make someone unfit for national office—even if that someone is already plotting to do it again. There’s no way to rationalize an outright Trump victory except as a despicable reflection of the American character.
As president, Trump will likely issue shock and awe executive orders that will activate some form of Trump’s MAGA-pleasing deportation threat. The logistics of a nationwide mass kidnapping of millions of “illegals,” who are “poisoning the blood” of America are unclear. Trump confirmed last Monday that his plan for mass deportations will involve a national emergency declaration and the military. If street protests are mobilized, the regime—with a bloated strongman twitching for a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act—will deploy troops. The worst-case scenarios, including razor-wired concentration camps in the desert, are beyond horrifying.
Our country has been deliberately set on fire by fellow Americans. Aside from mass deportations and contempt for climate change, human rights, and gun control, Trump will appoint a more reactionary federal judiciary and assault the press. On day one, Trump will pardon the J6ers, creating a paramilitary force answerable to him. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium and include a federal government stocked with fools and jesters whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader.
Trump has already initiated a cabinet reminiscent of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German Expressionist film about an evil hypnotist who brainwashes automatons to commit murders for him. Trump’s lackeys and loyalists include a propagandist for Russia—Tulsi Gabbard—as director of national intelligence, a Fox News host and subject of sexual assault charges—Pete Hegseth—as secretary of defense, an End Times Christian Zionist—Mike Huckabee—as ambassador to Israel, and an accused statutory rapist—Matt Gaetz—as attorney general.
Somehow topping all these MAGA freaks is the anti-vaxxer—Robert F. Kennedy—nominated to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy recently commented that on its first day in power, the Trump regime will ban fluoride in water. Fluoridated water has been a favorite target of paranoid anti-communist conspiracists dating to the 1950s. In Stanley Kubrick’s vicious satireDr. Strangelove, General Jack D. Ripper explains that he avoids fluoridated water because it’s a communist plot that will sap his “precious bodily fluids.”
Trump’s nominations are meant to bolster his effort to lay waste to the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or purse strings. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt. Trump’s cabinet offers a deliberate negation or mockery of the government functions they’re supposed to administer. They are his shock troops.
Trump wants to force Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves by confirming these unqualified toadies. Republicans will not try to stop this Trump travesty or any other. On the contrary, they’ll say—and are already saying it—that they owe it to Americans to give them every stupid, destructive thing they voted for.
Having lived through the circus of Trump 1.0, the voters also affirm that they’d prefer to plunge the country back into that embarrassing prior horror: blatant corruption, blathering of state secrets, the turbo-obnoxious Trump family, freak-show personnel choices, blue-state retribution, government-by-impulse, and policy-by-tweet. Trump 2.0 will likely involve more overt and impeachable crises, like flouting court orders or the Constitution. Trump’s voters are plainly willing to run the risk. Knowing now what a Trump show-presidency looks like, they’ve voted for a sequel.
The public has chosen malevolent leadership. The only consolation for the enemies within is clarity—the moral clarity of the voter’s decision is crystalline: Trump will regard his slim plurality vote margin as a “mandate” to do his worst. We hope that many of the ideas on Trump’s demented wish list will not actually come to fruition and that our democracy can once more withstand this sociopath and the lunatics who surround him. But that is just desperate, wishful thinking. As of yet, there is nothing that will break the iron grip Trump has over his cult, now joined by a plurality of Americans.
Over the past decade, opinion polls have shown Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. The United States will become a different kind of country. The lesson of this election is that the American people aren’t worthy of their Constitution. They elected a president who has never read it and who, by his behavior, holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, in contempt. Like the counter-culture hippies and anti-Vietnam radicals of the 1960s, the enemies within are rebels—strangers in a strange land, exiled inside a country many of us no longer feel fully part of.
In the midst of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Richard Nixon won a huge and depressing landslide reelection in 1972. In a stunning shift, this dark history was overturned with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Change is always possible, but we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us. Acknowledging this is not surrender but a realization that the fights ahead will be formidable, but that anything is possible.
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The Election Does Not Redeem Donald Trump’s Moral Indecency
We can and must keep standing against his cruelty.
Nov 20, 2024
Tens of millions of Americans voted against Donald Trump and the cruelty he celebrates. None of us have to see the election as a vindication of his contempt for democracy, basic decency, and anyone who disagrees with him. In our constitutional democracy, there is never a final election, there is always another day, and it is indisputably legitimate to speak up and criticize those in elected office, including the president.
Today, we doubt these basic truths because we know Trump seeks to undo them. He has made clear that he wants to rule as an American Putin. That is certainly his goal, and we cannot pretend otherwise. But we need not accept this or conclude it is inevitable. There is no guarantee he succeeds, and we must use all legal and peaceful means available to us in order to stand in his way and to insist on the enduring primacy of our democratic values and our constitutional system.
The fact that most voters preferred Trump does not mean what is immoral is now moral, what is obscene is now respectable.
Trump sneers at the cherished principles that truly make the United States great—the rule of law, racial equality, equality of men and women, constitutional rights like freedom of speech and due process, free and fair elections, and the notion of limits on power that make government officials public servants advancing the national interest rather than kleptocrats seeking to line their own pockets. Those who reject what Trump stands for must defend these principles and insist on the centrality of distinctions between right and wrong, even as Trump seeks to eviscerate the very notion of morality.
Consider the basic moral concepts we learned as children. Bullies are bad. Lying is wrong. You don’t insult someone else, and especially not because of how they look or where they come from. Trump embodies each and every one of these immoral traits. He is a schoolyard bully who delights in crude insults, which I will not repeat but which we have all heard so many times that we may have become desensitized to these outrages. Yet we know what he has said, and we know who he is. We know that he degrades and demeans women, immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities—indeed, anyone who is different from him and anyone who dares to disagree with him. No elementary school teacher would tolerate such behavior from a student, and we can never accept such moral failure from a person placed in a position of public trust.
Those who Trump insults, mocks, and derides are human beings, although he smears them as “vermin,” “dogs,” and “animals,” words that are obviously intended to dehumanize. Indeed, he has quite literally said that some immigrants are “not people.” He will not extend to others the basic courtesies and respect that decent people instinctively extend to co-workers, members of the community, and indeed all human beings. Trump’s goal is to mark us as second-class citizens—at best. He does not have this power unless we cede it to him or unless others, especially other government officials, defer to him. There is very little Trump can accomplish on his own and, although he feels no sense of shame, some of those he will ask to carry out his plans may. We must remind them that there is a difference between right and wrong, and that morality matters. We must remember that, even if some of us do not seem to be the initial targets of Trump’s wrath, we must stand with those who are most vulnerable, recognizing that when cruelty singles out one group, we do not know where it will end.
We have lived with all of this for nearly a decade, and we are tired. We are sick of Trump’s bullying, his lack of decency, his preening egotism and constant demand for adulation. We hoped that all of this could be placed in our past. Instead, it continues to be our reality. Some will ask us to reconcile with this, to accept it. We need not do either. This is what it means to be free. We certainly should not adopt Trump’s own tactics. We must refuse to embrace the politics of personal insults, bullying, and hatred. Yet we must continue to insist it is wrong when Trump does these things, and that, even though it has now become normal, making cruelty normal is a rejection of our most fundamental principles that we can never accept. Trump won an election—an election where nearly half of voters rejected his tired, blustering act. The fact that most voters preferred Trump does not mean what is immoral is now moral, what is obscene is now respectable. The celebration of disrespect and indecency will never be right. No election can change that.
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