1. Well, this sucks.
2. Going for an evening bike ride last night on eerily empty streets as the ominous Portland crows flocked into my neighborhood, the feeling it most reminded me of was the last night out in March 2020 before the COVID shutdowns took effect. “See you on the other side,” is what we said to each other then, knowing we were entering a dark and uncertain era. I saw that phrase come up again last night, though it’s less clear what it means now.
3. I’m sad for our country. I knew a Harris win would likely be narrow, but I did honestly think we were better than this, that enough Americans would be repulsed by Trump and what he stands for to make the right decision. I was wrong.
4. Democrats are going to be justifiably bitter about this election, but no one who matters is in denial about the result or suggesting that the votes are fraudulent. Harris isn’t going to be on the phone with Democratic officials demanding that they “find” enough votes to flip the state, she isn’t going to sic a violent mob on the Capitol, and she isn’t going to concoct some constitutionally dubious scheme to hold onto power. If she were to try any of that, Republicans would rightly condemn her as unfit for office and a threat to democracy.
5. I’ve graded Biden on a curve because all I really wanted from him was to stop Trump and considered any other good he accomplished just gravy. For a brief time it seemed he’d achieved that. It’s all I really wanted from Harris too, but neither of them could pull it off.
6. If I were to put an optimistic spin on this, it’s that inflation is the mindkiller. As Matt Yglesias noted last week, this is a terrible environment for incumbent parties:
The most important context for this race — what broadly distinguishes the family of takes you should pay attention to from those you should dismiss — is what’s happening internationally. The UK Conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian Liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right party lost its first post-Covid elections in Australia. The incumbent coalition in Germany is hideously unpopular. This means that if you’re asking “How did Democrats blow it?” or “Why is this even close?” you’re asking the wrong question.
You can tell a nuanced story about how post-pandemic inflation was a global phenomenon, that it started high in the US but is now below the rate in many peer countries, that we avoided economic scenarios that could have been much worse, and that America ultimately experienced an enviable economic recovery. (I made that case here two weeks ago.) But that’s a story that only high-information voters are going to listen to. For everyone else, “prices low under Trump, high under Biden” is all that mattered.
That’s not rational and it doesn’t make anything suck less in the near-term, but if you want to make a case that Democrats lost because of factors that will become less relevant as memory of inflation fades and other issues become more salient, I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to take some small comfort in that.
7. Unfortunately that’s definitely not the whole story. Along with anti-incumbent bias, there was another major worry I had going into the election, which was about the information environment. I’ve struggled to come up with the right metaphor for this and the best I’ve come up with is “dark energy.” Borrowing the term from cosmology, dark energy is a kind of energy that exerts massive influence on the universe but isn’t observed directly; its existence is inferred from phenomena that are hard to make sense of without it.
This strikes me as a decent metaphor for the declining influence of traditional media to shape narratives and the rising influence of social media, right-wing alternative media, podcasts, etc. If you read mainstream media coverage of Trump and wonder how on Earth anyone could support him, this is part of your answer. The MSM narrative isn’t landing. Stories from less legible kinds of media are.
To put in bluntly, over the past decade I’ve seen a lot of people I know whom I considered smart and reasonable getting swayed by and focused on some of the dumbest shit imaginable. My worry leading up to Tuesday was that my anecdotal experience is more widespread than I’d have liked to believe, and that’s been borne out by the results. This is a really hard problem to solve and I wish I had an answer for it, but I don’t.
8. To render this metaphor completely on the nose, I’ll note that one of main points of evidence for the existence of dark energy is the observation of a “redshift.”
9. This year as in 2020, I was one of the handful of people affiliated with the libertarian movement making a vocal, public case for voting against Trump and supporting the Democratic nominee. All things considered, I’d much rather have spent the next four years as the online punching bag for libertarians whenever President Harris did something dumb than be the guy whose warnings about Trump will be tested by reality.
10. On the flipside, the people who’ve been saying Trump won’t be so bad because he’s too incompetent or lazy to follow through on his threats are going to see their predictions tested too.
11. For an indication of how much worse a second Trump administration can be, consider the shift from appointing a flawed but competent technocrat like Scott Gottlieb to the FDA in 2016 to letting anti-vax kook RFK Jr “go wild on health.” I’ve written more criticism of the FDA than most people, but this is not a promising path to reform! The word to remember is “kakistocracy.”
12. One of the best frames for thinking about Trump remains Josh Barro’s prescient description of him as a “tail-risk” candidate way back in 2016:
[If] Trump were a stock, then you’d be demanding a risk premium to buy him.
In fact, Trump calls for a huge risk premium because, while he probably wouldn’t be a disastrous president, the low-probability disasters that he might cause would be immensely costly. Some of them involve nuclear weapons and global mass deaths. Pricing those risks in properly should push his share price comfortably below Clinton’s, even if you think she is very bad. […]
People are failing to price in the small risk that a Trump presidency could cause us to lose everything we value, and that scares the hell out of me.
The first three years of the Trump White House were a self-inflicted shit show, but they got to coast on generally favorable conditions. The pandemic showed how ill-equipped they were to deal with an actual crisis. (The singular exception being Operation Warp Speed, which makes the Republican turn to anti-vax all the more infuriating.) Conditions look way more challenging this time around: ongoing and potential wars, ballooning deficits, avian flu, just to name a few anticipated problems. The chances of a tail-risk catastrophe are way higher than anyone should be comfortable with.
13. Free market types loved to denigrate Harris’s anti-price gouging proposals, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Trump floating some kind of price controls to deal with problems caused by his own tariffs, deportations, or inflation isn’t far-fetched.
14. A question I’ve been asking longtime friends from libertarian circles is whether the “libertarian movement” still exists. The consensus is that the movement as we knew it is dead. The fusionist alliance with the right has been killed by national conservatism, and Trump exposed how many so-called libertarians were motivated more by contempt for the left than by any real commitment to liberty. The detached stance of the 2000s, marked by equal disdain for left and right, is tired and out of touch. Nominally libertarian institutions carry on but there’s not enough there to energize and rejuvenate the distinct movement that grew out of the post-World War II and Cold War environment.
15. The modern libertarian movement spent most of its history attuned to the threat of socialism; it has failed to adapt to the autocratic threat from the American right.
16. In The Individualists, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi provide a much more capacious and wide-ranging description of libertarianism as a constellation of commitments that are interpreted in different ways in different eras: private property, skepticism of authority, free markets, individualism, spontaneous order, and individual liberty. These ideas are worth preserving and fighting for, but I’m not sure that those of us who advocate them should short-hand to the term “libertarian” outside of an academic or specialized context for a while if we want to be accurately understood. For practical purposes we’re just liberals now.
17. In the Bush and Obama years, if all I knew about someone is that they self-described as libertarian, I would assume we agree on a decent amount and would be curious to meet them. Now? Not so much, and maybe quite the opposite.
18. Libertarians should be energized by opposition to Trump, the most genuinely fascist threat to the United States of our lifetimes. Many of the ones I know and admire will be. But for many others, I expect that the tech money sloshing around on the new right and the appeal of being a “heterodox thinker” will win out.
19. The libertarian (if we can call it that) project that has most risen to the occasion of facing up to the Trump era is Shikha Dalmia’s The Unpopulist and there’s not really a close second.
20. If you’re looking for a small and underfunded publication to support financially that’s doing good work, a very worthy choice is Liberal Currents! (Yes, I write for them occasionally.)
21. In the time ahead there’s going to be a lot of reflection about what Democrats might do differently to win elections in a country that is tilting right. But popularity isn’t everything. Welcoming immigrants, defending women’s rights, respecting trans and other LGBT people, fighting police abuses and mass incarceration, standing up for democracy and the rule of law, and advocating peace and trade, to name just a few, are all principles worth fighting for even when they take some hits in the short-term.
22. Read Ken White today.
23. I hope I’m wrong about how rotten the fruits of this election are going to be. But regardless of whether the worst possibilities come to pass, this was the election in which there was no longer any illusion about who Trump is. Tens of millions of Americans looked at his racism, his sexual abuse, his corruption, his lawlessness, his stupidity, his dishonesty, his cruelty, and his assault on our democracy and decided they’re OK with it, maybe even wanted it. I won’t regard any of them the same way ever again.
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