The Return of Trump

Just about everyone and their dog, cat and pet fish has a view on why Kamala Harris lost the US presidential election. The answer is pretty simple: she had fewer votes and fewer votes in the electoral college. I am not trying to be flippant. Like you, I'm sure I've read an endless stream of commentaries on the election and the Democrats across-the-board failure. And, also probably like you, watching the US election from afar, I've been surprised by friends -- well, more acquaintances -- who have said they were undecided or even voted for Trump.  And, I am sure like you, I personally feel that there is more than enough blame to go around. In an effort to say something perhaps slightly different let me make a few points.

First, I don't fault Harris. She did the level headed best that she could have done. She came to the campaign late, the normal leadership contest -- which would have allowed her to stake out policy positions and explain them in more detail -- was not there, and she inherited a political infrastructure that appears to have been little short of a mess. Outside of their core areas of support, the Democrats as a party did not seem to have an organization on the ground that would have allowed them to turn out their vote or broaden it. Harris had about 10 million fewer votes than Biden, while Trump remained constant (suggesting that there was, in fact, not a lot of movement to Trump outside of his core constituencies).  The difference, however, is not that the Biden campaign was better at mobilizing voters. They're weren't and the late Mike Davis actually wrote a really piece on this in Sidecar. Where Biden made inroads, he was able to piggy back on other political groups that organized on the ground but were not part of the Democratic Party apparatus. None of this was Harris' fault. In fact, I think she campaigned as long and as hard as possible. She was dealt a losing hand (for a range of reasons) and ... lost. 

The take away point here is this: in retrospect, what would have happened if there had been a Democratic leadership contest? Harris might have won and used the contest to create her own political space within the Democratic Party. Or, she might not have. I noticed CNN was already lamenting that there is no Democratic front runner for 2028. Allowing that it is way too early to make that determination, let me also say: (1) good and (2) that is lazy journalism on CNN's part. Looking around for a front runner allows easy reporting. The absence of a front runner pushes the party to where it needs to be: considering its voting base, thinking about the policies needed to build the future, counteracting incredibly weak and lazy journalistic presentations of Democrats, and organizing. If there had been a real leadership contest, we don't know who would have won. But, it might not have been Harris. In either case, all bets would have been off. The take away here is that political leaders who are past their best before date need to step aside and it should not have taken George Clooney to make this point. 

Second, and connected to this, is the actual nature of the Democrats campaign. I am not certain it convinced anyone of anything. IOW, those who supported Harris did so before the campaign. Those who supported Trump ... same thing. The voting shifts don't seem to have been from Harris to Trump (or, vice versa) but from Biden to not voting. The Harris campaign amounted to a series of celebrity endorsements.  I understand why they did this. It was a second best option in the absence of an effective on-the-ground organization, but it got tiring to listen to pop stars endorsing Harris. It really did and I wondered ... why should anyone take their cue from them anyway? The drop in vote suggests to me that a lot of people felt the same way. 

The Republicans, I hasten to add, did not necessarily do any better organizing but they could continue to piggyback on self-organized groups and on evangelical churches to motivate and -- in this case maintain -- their vote. 

For the Dems, the take away is this: they need to do three things: 

1. Rebuild their party apparatus where it is weak 
2. Make alliances with other existing groups with strong organizations on the ground (groups that are opposed to Republicanism but have similar ideological perspectives as Democrats)
3. Begin the process of going after the Republicans on their "home turf." 

I'll come back to that last point in a future blog. But, for now, let me say that I think it is important for Democrats to use the time that they have to take the political contest to the Republicans on their home turf. This is, in fact, what Trumpists did to the Democrats in the Blue Wall. This is not a TV commercial, snap your fingers and it is fixed, kind of thing. It will take time but the Dems have time right now. And, it will be the right politics. But, I'll explain that later. 

Third, if you have not read Carol Anderson's White Rage, you should. Anderson makes a number of key points to which more people should have been paying attention. In very brief these are as follows. (#1) The Republican approach to politics that we have seen under Trump is not new. In fact, it dates to well before Obama, even if Obama's electoral success gave further impetus to it. The easy contrast between a pre-Trump Republican Party and a Trump one does not really stand up. In fact, it was the changes through which the Republican Party passed independently of Trump that laid the ground work for him. An example is "voter fraud." I've listened in amazement to commentators who seem to honestly think that Trump made this up and that his supporters who continue to believe it are being tricked by him. As Anderson points out, the truth of the matter is that the idea of voter fraud went back to the Bush, Jr. days. The numbers Trump cited may have been his own but the idea of massive voter fraud was circulating within the Republican Party long before Trump arrived on the scene. Said differently, Republican supporters believed Trump because they already believed -- independently of him saying it -- that voter fraud had become part of American public life. The campaign against Trump's perspective needed to dislodge not Trump's words but a couple of decades worth of self-confirming discussion replete with its own data among Republicans.  It turns out, that was impossible to do.

(#2) Likewise, the use of vigilante politics (let's call it that) long pre-dates Trump as well. Again, Bush, Jr. could be implicated, but the roots are deeper than that. Republican politics has long empowered ordinary citizens to take the law into their own hands and feel that they are right in so doing. One could recall the disruption to recounting in Florida during the Bush/Gore election. Said differently, no one in the Republican Party batted an eye at the vigilante politics that accompanies Trump because it was already deeply embedded among the faithful. 

What does this mean? It means that getting high-profile Republicans to endorse Harris could do little good because the trajectory of Republican politics was already set. The discourses Trump and his followers mobilized were not new, but old and that oldness gave them strength. In the face of everything else, Harris was fighting history. 

Mitt Romney slumps in new U.S. poll - The Globe and Mail

This news story provides the latest polling information on the upcoming US election:

Mitt Romney slumps in new U.S. poll - The Globe and Mail:

The truth of the matter is that Obama will not lose this election.

We have to be circumspect in our assessment of polls. As the recent Alberta election demonstrated, even massive and sophisticated polling can be inaccurate and, at times, remarkably so. This is something all pollsters know. It is why they include the margin of error in their own description of their numbers. The margin of error usually reads something like this:

This poll is accurate to within plus or minus three percent, nineteen times out of twenty. What this fictional example (which is actually pretty standard wording for real polls) means is that the poll itself is about three percent wrong ninety five percent of the time. So, for instance, a poll that said "50% of Americans have a favourable view of Obama" is actually saying something like "somewhere between 47 and 53% of Americans have a favourable view of Obama. The ninety five percent (nineteen times out of twenty) means that 95% of the time the result I just examples (somewhere between ...) is right. And, five percent of the time, the "somewhere between" is even wider. In other words, this poll begins by letting us know that there is a five percent chance that it is completely wrong. The higher the number of people polls, whether or not it is a rolling poll, the more sophisticated the polling methodology and analysis, will make a poll more accurate (a poll, for instance, of 1000 people is more accurate then a poll of 100 just by virtue of random chance). Other factors include who is polls (how diverse the polling sample, for instance, is important. A poll conducted only in, say, New York is less accurate of the American national picture then a poll conducted in diverse parts of the country, etc.).

The other problem with polls is that they lend the wrong impression to politics. They get us thinking about politics as a popularity contest and voting as something akin to calling into American Idol. This might be the way people think about potential candidates between elections, but it does not reflect how people actually approach voting. As we saw in Alberta, a lot of Albertans did not like the ruling PCs but when it came time to cast their votes, they sat down, thought about it, and said "gee, given the other options, the PCs are the best choice." This is another reason why mid-term polling is often different then election time polling. If an election is far in the future, those polled may just be offering their views at the time, as opposed to a serious consideration of how they might vote because, after all, a poll is not a vote.

With all this said, then, we need to be careful about polls -- and there have been at least a couple -- that show Obama running ahead of Romney. The best we can say is that these polls might or might not be an accurate reflection of how Americans will vote on election day. What is more, there is a lot of time between now and election day and the American presidential election system is complicated. Contrary to what most Canadians believe, American  do not have a direct vote for the president. George Bush Jr., for instance, actually had fewer votes the Al Gore in his first election victory. This does not happen often -- that the winning candidate has fewer votes then a losing candidate -- but it can and does happen owing to the way the American system works (which is through something called an "Electoral College" in which votes are weighted on the basis of state population and a person getting the most votes in a state, most of the time, gets all that particular state's support in the Electoral College regardless of their margin of victory or whether or not they had a majority of the votes cast).

My blunt statement: Obama will win, is not, therefore, based on recent polling. It is based on an analysis of American voting patterns and the particular body of people who came together to elect Obama. The rise of the Tea Party disguised the fact that the Tea Party was highly unrepresentative of the US. Even thought they like to picture themselves as average Americans, they represented minority religious views and were near universally white. I have not checked this out in terms of the data we have, but my guess is that Tea Partiers were overwhelmingly small-c conservatives to begin with and likely working or lower middle class. In other words, conservative white working and lower middle class evangelicals. Judging from their protests and platforms, I'd also suggest that some of them were simply not well informed about policy issues (the idea of rolling pay dates, for example, for "public servants" if the government ran out of cash was just silly, but I blogged on that some time ago. It missed the point that the military are public servants and hence constitute a big chuck of the government budget line and it missed this question: how long would you work at your job if someone told you you'd only be paid every second or third day day?)

The Tea Party seemed to catch the Democrats by surprise. It likely shouldn't have but the Tea Party did not "play by the rules." You can call your opponent names, but you don't call him Hitler. You can oppose what your opponent is doing but you don't derail the state to meet your political objectives. Instead, the Tea Party set a whole bunch of new rules and mobilized in a way that surprised the Democrats. This combined with some pretty ineffective government from the Obama administration led to a mid-term collapse in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Don't bet on that happening again. First, the Democrats now know what is coming. "You're going to use thinly veiled anti-Hispanic racism to mobilized an economically fragile white base. OK, we'll take that and appeal to the very Hispanic voters -- millions of Americans in key states -- and appeal to them." The Democrats have now had two years to develop a response to Tea Party rhetoric. My bet is that they have used that time to good advantage and can counter the negative Tea Partyesque campaigning that will come their way. Second, the Democrats misjudged the importance of the mid-term elections. They let the   pro-Obama coalition they mobilized lapse. Again, they won't make that mistake this time. Moreover, the base that elected Obama views the presidential election as more important. Finally, Obama and the Democrats never had the white conservative evangelical vote to begin with. Indeed, Obama actually did worse among that constituency then his predecessors had done. In a large number of ridings (what American call districts) with significant evangelical populations, Democratic vote actually went down -- despite Obama's national win -- in the last presidential election.

What is more, the Democratic base (moderate Christians, ethnic minorities, youth, women) view conservative evangelicals with something approximating fear. They have no desire to see a return to what they viewed as the horrors of the Bush administration and will not be tricked by a supposedly moderate Republican who must, of necessity, court a more extreme voting block (in the manner of Bush with his "compassionate conservatism disguising the extremist views of his supporters). In other words, the Tea Party transformed politics from politics into a war for the "soul" of the nation; the Democrats will be happy with this rhetoric and say "exactly" so ... who would you prefer to have running things? America is a fractured country; deeply divided on ethnic, religious, gendered, and class lines. The majority of Americans who supported Obama will reach the same decision they reached last time 'round. "We'd rather have someone like us running things then someone like ... say, a cross-dressed Sarah Palin."

American Elections and Alternative Visions

Republicanism fails. At least this is the point I tried to make in my last post. It fails not because it provides some sort of cover for what is really a covert imperialist project (although it might do this, too). It fails because it cannot deliver what it promises. What it promises, it seems to me, or the ideas it claims to support, are not illegitimate. Some of the stuff the lurks beneath the covers of Republicanism might be illegitimate. To be sure: there are bigots, rednecks, intolerant people, anti-gay people, xenophobes, etc., who vote for the Republican party and who like George Bush, Jr. They are not the average American. And, to be honest, they don’t really concern me. I’m never going to convince, say, someone who is vibrantly anti-immigration to change their views. I’m never going to convince a racist that she or he is wrong. What concerns me is the mass of average, ordinary working and middle class Americans who are not like this.

What are those concerns that are so legitimate? If you go through all the different planks in the Republican platform, the basic focus (whether in political, military, international, or cultural or economic, etc., policy) is on security. Republicans believe America is under siege from either internal or external enemies. These enemies make America soft; they question the integrity of its institutions, they question its traditions, they threaten the safety of its citizens. The idea of security is much more than a wall along a border or helicopters patrolling the boundaries of Saskatchewan wheat fields. Security is about knowing your kids can walk to school without problems; that your niece who is travelling Europe after finishing college is OK. Its about knowing your job is going to be there next week or next month or next year. Its about having enough money to pay for groceries. Its about the air we breath and the water we drink. Security, IOW, is about a series of intensely human concerns that are entirely legitimate.

Republicans took this legitimate concern with security and spun it in a negative and defensive way. In addition to being a complete policy failure, the other big problem with the security agenda is its inwardness. And, I think this is another thing that came to the fore in the recent American mid-term elections. At least a section of the American public is expressing increasing concern about the inward-looking conception of security mobilized by Republicans. They are looking for something else. In what is really a two-party system, this means voting Democrat. It is not clear, however, that the Democrats have isolated what the American public is actually looking for, nor that they are the people to develop constructive policies that address public concerns. The lesson of this election and the previous ones is that they should or, very quickly, they will find themselves on the outs again.

This is why. The American public in voting against Republicans voted against a conception of security and vision of the future that was static. What the Republicans look to do is make America secure. And, they aim to do this, by and large, through force of arms, advanced technology, assertions of traditional values, and dissembling the institutions of the welfare state that empowered previously marginalized people. By its very nature, the security agenda seeks to protect what Americans already have. This is precisely its problem. It seeks to preserve and conserve. It does not seek to expand and develop. The great weakness of Republicanism, other than the fact it is a policy flop, is that it offers nothing beyond “security”, even rhetorically. The Republican project for the US is to preserve “our way of life” from threat.

Let me suggest that this is not enough. Historically, the American project of nation stood for so much else. It meant a lot more then keeping what one had. We can all acknowledge that the ideal of America has been compromised in practice, but what it stood for was important both inside and outside the US. The American project of nation was to build a different kind of society. It was not just to preserve what one had but to make something new, something better, something more fair, something based on principle rather than history. The American revolutionary tradition is nothing to sneeze at. Its an important intellectual trajectory that expressed -- in its classic formulation -- some complex and important ideas. The “founding fathers” were looking to see the creation of a new society based on balancing political and economic imperatives, on a commitment to equality, on democracy, on justice that was not arbitrary. They were interested in the transparency of government and its accountability.

Since that time, other ideas have been added to this tradition as other revolutionary thinkers have contributed to the American intellectual tradition: ethnic and racial equality, legal equality of all before the law, state action to help the poor, universal public education, religious pluralism, among others.

In my view, the American intellectual tradition is at its best when it is not defensive. It is at its best when it is expansive, when it is looking to be dynamic, and when it is acting on principle to make something new. This is, I think, the real problem with Republicanism: it can’t do this. It can’t offer Americans anything new. It can only offer them a protected past. A Republican who offers something new -- stem cell research, equality for gay people, socialized medicine, gun control, bilingualism -- won’t be a Republican for very long. They won’t even get past the primary. Republicanism, then, by definition is not about American living up to its highest ideals. Its about a garrison mentality that preserves what one has -- and, to be sure, this is worth preserving -- from a hostile world.

The mid-term election results suggest that the American public is looking for something like the type of alternative vision on which the United States was founded to be again articulated by the Democratic Party. They need to do it. The Democratic Party has, rightly, be shot down by pundits for its failure to have much in the way of policy. Instead, it has tried to “moderate” its liberalism, taking a few planks from the Republican policy platform in order to win government. It should stop this. The mid-term election results did not produce Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress because Democrats took a fine lines from George Bush’s defensive vision of America. It won because people want something else. I believe the Democratic Party should start articulating that something else and it should begin with foreign policy.

What can/should a new American foreign policy entail? A number of things. First, a commitment to military disengagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. This means that the US will have to negotiate with the very people it (and, its allies like us in Canada) are trying to hunt down and kill. This is going to be hard. Its going to be painful. Its going to provoke accusations of “treating with terrorists” and “soft on terrorism” from the American right. My advise to the Democrats: tough it out. Trust the American public to understand what you are trying to do: establish real security through peace. Negotiated peace in Afghanistan and Iraq is going to take a long time, but the US needs to indicate to Iraqis and Afghans that it will discuss peace with the people who they support and who represent them. Like it or not, the “insurgents” in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan have a popular base. Talks will need to begin. Second, the US needs to begin one on one talks with North Korea. This will be a PR victory for North Korea but who cares? North Korea is a totalitarian state. Everything is a PR victory for North Korea within that country. Outside of it, no one is tricked by that propaganda. By beginning these talks the US can find out exactly what the North Korean government wants. And, it might be able to address some of its concerns in return for a return to non-proliferation.

Third, the US has to stop building a security wall along the Mexican border. This plays so poorly internationally and comes so close the dystopic sci-fi models of a gated American (see Handmaid’s Tale) that it is not funny. Instead, the US should work with Mexico and other Latin American countries to establish reasonable rates of migration to the US and naturalization processes for those who are already in that country.

Fourth, the US has to stop supporting Israel no matter what it does. It needs to recognize the legitimate government of the Palestinian Authority (Hamas) and it needs to stop providing aid and arms to Israel as long as it continues its policy of violent attacks on Palestinian citizens. Republicans in the US periodically ask “why do they hate us?” The one thing that could convince a whole bunch of “them” that the US is not that bad is to have a reasonable two-state policy solution for Palestinians. By recognizing and dealing with Hamas the US will indicate to Arab peoples that it respects democracy, even if democracy produces election results it does not like. Right now the US looks (to Arab peoples) like hypocritical nation. It preaches democracy and supports Israel because it is “democratic” but doesn’t do the same thing for Arabic-speaking peoples.

There is a lot more that could and should be done as well, but this is a good start. All of this can be done under the name of a new foreign policy, let’s call it “the new human security agenda.” Those who are defensive and static minded -- current Republican supporters -- won’t like any of this. To them, it will be the equivalent of supporting terrorism. It is, however, the only way: (1) the US can promote real peace and security, and (2) the only way it can establish its project of nation as a new and powerful democratic ideal.