As the Trump circus rolls on, testing how a coup might be prepared, the recriminations have begun on the Democrat side.
The majority in the House of Representatives has been reduced right to the bone — it will most likely end up with the Democrats about 7-10 seats down, the House about 225-210.
The Senate was equally disappointing. With eight or so Republican senate seats exposed, the Democrats have taken only one, in Colorado. That leaves them with 48 senators to the Republicans’ 50.
The remaining two slots are both Senate places in Georgia, where there is to be a run-off election, neither race having yielded a 50% plus-one result. The Democrats would have to win both to achieve a bare majority (with Vice-President Kamala Harris, as Senate president, casting the deciding vote).
But those slim majorities only work when the whole party votes uniformly. And that is a rare thing in the US. Democrat senators in Republican states, such as Joe Manchin in West Virginia, go where they will, according to their political needs. So too will at least a dozen reps.
The Democrat majority isn’t there. And it will soon get worse. Soon, there’ll be a redistribution of districts (and, hence, electoral college votes) based on the results of the 2020 census. That will allow state governments to redraw both the congressional district map and their state assembly maps to their benefit, and most of these governments are Republican.
The national aggregate congressional vote will show a majority for the Democrats, but pundits of right and centre will continue to nod their heads and say sagely that America is a centre-right country, etc etc, and a slice of mainstream progressives will agree.
There seems little prospect that this two-level fix will be remedied for years and years to come.The Democrats needed a “blue wave” to wash over all votes in this election and they don’t appear to have got it.
Having portrayed Trump as a disgrace to the American project, and the sacking of him a moral imperative, the Democrats appear to have got what they asked for: a tranche of Republican voters willing to vote out Trump, and Biden voters with no interest in going down ballot.
Within these dismal results is a greater disappointment; the failure of the Black and Latinx vote to rise or at least remain stable for the Democrats.
They thought they had this one in the bag. How could they not? Trump had begun his march to the White House by driving the Obama birther myth just when it had started to flag; the first speech of his 2016 campaign was to denounce immigrants as “rapists”.
In 2016 that had pushed the Black vote for Trump down to around 8.5%. In 2020 that jumped to 13.5%, with the male vote up to 18%. The Latinx Republican vote in 2012 was 27%. In 2020 it was 32%, plainly going in the wrong direction.
This is a major blow for the Democrats, since it suggests that the one-off anti-Trump “decency” vote has masked a deterioration in the sort of votes that the Democrats were hoping to rely on in the future. Biden’s victory came because of shifts in white voters — college-educated more than non-college — going the other way. As the Brookings institute exit poll shows this varied significantly from state to state.
The general conclusion might be that some of those who voted for Trump as disruptor — “I can’t stand the man, but going to vote for him because something has to happen” — switched back or stayed home in general disgust. But that’s no basis for a new coalition, and some figures are particularly alarming, such as the apparent zero shift of non-college whites back to the Democrats in Pennyslvania.
There was barely a road to Democratic victory through the new coalition — Latinx, Black, minority groups (LGBTIQ, Asian-Americans), youf, humanities-side college-educated whites — and the fact that it has gone backwards, against Trump, shows that nothing will guarantee it.
Trump got a better Black vote after he praised the tiki-torchlight Nazi parade than before. Who would the Republicans have to put up to weld that coalition together from the outside? Goebbels? James Earl Ray? The two as a ticket?
There are specific reasons for the low vote. As far as Latinx go, it appears the Democrat campaign was lackadaisical in key areas, and the anti-communist(!) vote snuck up on them in Miami. But they lost the Latinx community in Texas, in the Rio Grande valley, a place where you can go days without hearing English.
How? Is it religion, and abortion? Or that Trump’s economy has plumped up low-end wages, in a way that looks to many like a real recovery? Is this vote fracturing a sign that group/identity politics is fracturing in favour of class?
The Democrats talked of a national $15-per-hour minimum wage, but Biden never talked in the way Trump had about good jobs, or aimed at Trump’s limited success in creating them, or at the Republicans’ obsessive attempt to destroy Obamacare.
The “class” aspect is one, Crikey readers will be shocked to find, I’m not convinced by per se. It’s not old economic class v identity; it’s that within non-white groups, the class division along the knowledge line is starting to come apart. A section of such peoples are disputing the manner in which they are represented by community leaders. That makes a grand identity coalition unusable as a victorious base — because it cannot be reliably delivered by said leaders.
The party will have to go out and get the votes, each time. This is bad news for those people — knowledge-class feminists, professional people-of-colour — who wanted to forge a progressive coalition with such a poor attitudes test. In the middle run, it’s the only road back to the politics of a majority, against the real elites and dying capital.
But for the moment, the circus is in town.
One of the most fatal electoral mistakes ‘progressive’ mainstream parties make when courting various patchwork-identity constituencies is to project their own contrived fantasies of unicorn/rainbow fart ‘noble victimhood’ on each one. It’s classic middle-class paternalism and it’s why I despise identity politics: not so much the sick-making theft of the Others’ nuanced human richness and active agency (though that too), but the simple fact that it’s electoral suicide. Forget class/ideology/historical memory (Communism? – FFS!), for every one ex-Cuban who responded positively to bleeding heart Dem appeals over kids split from parents at the border, I’ll bet there were two who hate Mexican ‘rapist queue-jumpers’ even more than good ol’ white boys in Charlottesville. For every ‘Audacity to Hope’ African-American college grad appalled by Trump’s pussy-grabbing antics, bet there’d be two street ‘homies impressed by the machismo swagger of it (along with their female other halves) . Most Chinese, Korean and Indian shopkeepers cheered the harder-core anti-BLM police responses, terrified at ‘defund the police’ chants. And deep down I’m thinking pretty much everyone else in the Dem rainbow-victim seats would have been just fine with the Muslim ban…except of course for the Democrat rainbow strategists (who work and live among exactly no-one who doesn’t look, think and sound exactly like them) and those voters who buy into that ‘better angel’ pitch.
Lots do? Yes (and no bad thing, either). Enough, though? Nope. Sorry, but…no. And not ever, now. The white ‘progressive middle class‘ fantasy just doesn’t have the electoral legs anymore. A new pitch and connection has to be forged…one that starts by recognising the full spectrum of human strengths AND weaknesses in ALL voters, because that is the only basis for an honest conversation, and thus…trust. Weirdly? Seventy million US voters still trusted Trump more than Biden, because in his unforgivably repulsive behaviour and refusal to apologise for it…they found a kind of honesty, or at least the less un-palatable of the two dishonesties on offer.
The modern progressive’s problem is that he/she/they simply cannot bear to contemplate human/voting motivations as they are, rather than as they’d dearly like them to be. They can’t even talk about them honestly among themselves, lest they transgress the various unwritten laws of modern progressive discourse: that racism is an exclusively white phenomenon, that gendered inequity is strictly one dimensional and one-way, that the poor can’t be as nasty, lazy, greedy and conniving as the rich, that the LGBTQI community is always bullied, never the bully, that all refugees are saints, all priests are predators, all accusations from the powerless are true and all denials from the powerful are false. It’s a loaded, ersatz, catastrophically self-nobbling view of humanity (and the electorate), whose main intent is to flatter progressivism’s projected, narcissistic self-image, and whose main election outcome will continue to be the ‘shock’ of discovering that what your polls tell you motivates people to vote, and what actually does on the day, are not the same thing.
The right, the GOP, the Trumps of the world, meantime? They’re not so precious that they only want to win votes by ‘going high when the others go low’. They just want to win them. The nobler aspiration can still win more – when you’re an Obama.
Most ain’t.
That is the essence of the hotmess dumpster fire that is amerika – “the less un-palatable of the two dishonesties on offer.”.
When forced to choose between the Evil of Two Lessers people are right to be disgusted.
Gosh Jack Robertson on fire today! These are well framed unpalatable moments of truth.
I dunno. For a dude who despises “identity politics”, he sure ploughed through a bunch of identities—stereotyped ones at that, verging on borderline racism.
Calling out Indentitarianism is racist?
Wow, when did you stop beating your wife/slave/dog?
Not necessarily in that order, as per the old saw – “a dog, a woman, a walnut tree, the more you ….”
Chrs for the oblique nod, Indunn, at least I took it as such…this of course is the eternally paralysing and endlessly disheartening and bullying dead-end of the current ID-obsessed expression of ‘progressivism’: to be dismissed as suspiciously racist/sexist/Ism-ist etc etc for even raising the possibility that exactly such dismissal is why progressivism isn’t getting enough traction where it needs to…
It will sound simplistic but I’ve long thought that the simplest expression of the problem facing left-liberal democracy is the correct one: it is class thing, again – that in a world in which the only meaningful (and vast, ever caster and more civically catastrophic) ‘identity divide’ is now b/w the wealthy !few’ and the ‘very poor’ most…that you just can’t be rich and progressive now. At least in terms of electoral trust and connection, and/or at least certainly not rich as a result of being part of ‘monied progressive ecology’, which many – not entirely illegitimately, frankly – view as not really earned. Trump waived his WH salary. I know he’s about as big a bullshitting freeloading grifter as any swamp dweller ever could be…but voters still see his wealth (?!) as more belonging to their own class than Bidens.
This is huge problem for the future of left liberal leadership everywhere. Because it’s now exclusively rich, and like all middle/upper class neo-arrivistes, it refuses to be honest about the class/electoral-disconnect implications of that. Instead, they ramp up the (fiscally painless) obsession with ID issues as the definitive markers of ‘progressive moral decency’. I think it’s largely a projection of guilt and anxiety about…well, outrageous inequality, in which they suspect they’re on the side of the bad guys..
Because we human beings a) like to think of ourselves as morally ‘good’, but we also b) like being…rich. I’m not sure progressivism is going to be electorally successful again until its leadership squares up to the underlying tension, if not impossibility, of being both – in an increasingly have/have not material world.
Yeah but you see you just personified and demonstrated my point exactly, right? It’s the odious, passive-aggressive moral bullying and the profoundly condescending negation of the Others‘ agency and complex motivations, that drench your expressed world view in the opposite of trustability and inclusion that is crucial in winning votes. Sure, you’ll harvest hearty applause from those Crikeytariat fellow travellers who also like to boost their own morally superior self-view largely by aggressive comparison with others’ they get to tell themselves fall short of it…but they already vote for you. Right? Do you want to persuade the 71 million Trump voters of the inherently more decent and certainly more civically sustainable elements of the progressive/liberal democratic world view – over which I’ve got no real quibbles – or is your main aim to brandish and bolster your own self-perceptions by taking a cheap (and manifestly silly) swipe at mine?
Again and again, your brand of ‘progressivism’ reveals itself as both ersatz, and just….self-defeating. It’s obviously not working, mate. It’s obviously a self-indulgent and failing approach to liberal democratic progress.
Hey Guy, what do you mean by this?
I think you are making a very important point. The division between uber drivers and their passengers seems to cut through familiar political divisions. The new precarious work styles may help to brew resentment, particularly when dropping off deliveries to knowledge workers enjoying their new domestic work arrangements.
So what is the “poor attitudes test”?
Apart from the Latinos in Miami who suspected Joe of being a Communist, the voters at the bottom of the socio-economic dung heap are much smarter than the Democrats take them for. They know the DNC is the political arm of corporate America and that it is just as ruthless and grasping as the GOP, and that neither party will do anything for them unless it is forced to. Voting for Trump is the equivalent of throwing a stick of dynamite at the whole corrupt, fraudulent business.
The Democrats need to heed Bernie and AOC, who has pointed out that candidates who advocated a ‘radical’ progressive agenda all got up and Dems lost a lot of timid centrists. Perhaps Labor could donate Joel Fitzgibbon to the US Dems. Joel would fit in nicely with the moribund majority centrists in the Dems.
One thing I still can’t understand.
Republicans do relatively well in both House and Senate elections but not in the Presidential race. Yet Trump is seen as the hope for the Georgia runoffs. If I were the Republican candidates in Georgia I’d be trying to distance myself. His antics would surely be turning off wavering republican voters.