The Upside of the Trump Sweep
I didn't vote for him, but I see silver linings in Democratic losses
You get all the context you need from this title. Better stated, I now see upsides to the Democrats’ losses.
I don’t focus on Republicans because I don’t vote for them. The Democrats are my party. They’re my inheritance from New Deal-loving grandparents of blessed memory and from my parents’ work in the Civil Rights Movement. One of my uncles was a Freedom Rider who was almost killed down south, my dad volunteered for the Black Panthers in Oakland as unbelievable as that sounds, and my mom marched at countless protests. I was born to care about this party.
How will the Democrats respond to the current debacle? If they don’t move in a direction that represents my interests and values, if they continue to support people who literally want me dead, like Columbia students and faculty who rallied for Hamas and Hezbollah last week outside a Jewish student center, then I can’t stay.
Some Democrats, and apparently many columnists at the New Yorker and New York Times, can rationalize self-defeating and frankly hilarious groups like Queers for Palestine, but I’m in no rush to join Jews for Antisemitism.
I’m hoping that millions of disappointed party members push the Dems to success. The path itself is clear — Trump ran an election that won big. We know what messages worked or failed. Sure, he may have only won 1.5% of the popular vote, but trends shows a sustained shift from the left despite the historically high turnout, so you can’t blame people staying home. It doesn’t take much imagination to say that a 1.5% win in 2024 could be a 15% landslide by 2028.
Along with clear lessons, I also see significant benefits to this election. The electorate fired as much as they hired. My Black Panther-volunteering dad has long taught me to never underestimate the American voter.
If you believe in democracy as all the anxious Democrats told us was at stake this election, then you listen to what democracy is shouting.
Progressive culture lost
It’s confusing that there’s a left wing movement not at all controlled by the Democratic party — you can’t vote against vibes or cultural appropriations of headscarves, but, to me, the vast electoral shift by most Americans means the product Democrats sell doesn’t have buyers. What this product is, exactly, is up for debate. There is no such thing as Harrism. To this day, no one can say what she stood for, I suspect neither can she. We can only observe her actions.
Harris didn’t campaign on progressive causes. She was careful not to run as the BLM BIPOC LGBTQAI+ DEI capital letter candidate that sums up the identity fixations of the left — and showcases just how inaccessible, exclusive and, in the term of the now forgotten Tim Walz, weird they are. Whatever happened to adjectives?
But she also didn’t not run on this. There was no Sister Soulja moment. There was no declaration of common sense values. There was no you, just they/them.
OK I’m kidding about that last line. It’s an homage to the Trump ad that is as manipulative as it is insightful about the pitfalls of the left.
Harris never articulated a vision beyond heartfelt gratitude for the hardworking people who raised her in Oakland, people she abandoned for San Francisco. To me that says it all. It reminds of Michelle Obama’s valorization of her working class grandmother at the DNC. Please note that the former first lady lives in a mansion and her daughters’ relationship to work will always be theoretical.
Remind me again what product or service the Obamas’ manufacture to earn vast wealth? Why are they, and the Clintons, super rich yet don’t run factories or banks or software companies? Remind me how that’s different from Trump funneling money to his family?
Harris didn’t run as DEI — but in 2024 it was too late for the left to separate the candidate from the cause. By the time Harris ascended, DEI was baked into the party. It didn’t matter how Harris positioned herself in the campaign. The political culture had already positioned her.
Biden proves the point when, years earlier, he promised to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, but didn’t know whom. It should be patently ridiculous to elevate/denigrate people based on their skin color, but this is where the left has taken us.
By rejecting Harris and all that she stood for — whether rightly or wrongly accused — demonstrates the political culture that undergirds the Democratic party has been repudiated.
You can’t have lose every demographic except for wealthy whites and not have cultural reverberations. If you disagree and want to stick to the playbook but with a white dude instead of a poorly-performing Harris, then please explain Biden’s unpopularity — before we learned he was too old to run again?
You’ve painted yourself into a corner if you blame race and gender bias for Harris’ loss. My argument is that while those are certainly true as factors, it’s the culture of focusing on race and gender that’s become more problematic than the biases themselves.
You can’t lose every swing state and not have it tarnish your brand along with your product. If you point to a few swing state down ballot wins to refute me, let me walk you back from that elm to see the rest of them.
If you’re Jewish; if you’re working class; if you find solace at church; if you're OK with gender differences; if you’re a feminist who has noticed the trans movement seems to target women but not men; if you’re the parent of struggling kids preyed on by diagnoses from experts who proscribe them with hormone blockers, or, more typically, highly-addictive stimulants of unknown longterm consequence; if you teach at a college and don’t want to join a leadership that praises diversity but only for those it considers diverse; if you want to be treated as an equal no matter where your parents are from or what color group you’re told you belong to, then it’s easy to tell that progressive political culture is grotesque and often immoral. It’s sectarian, at times violent, and definitely anti-intellectual, which for a snob like me, is a grave sin.
If you’re more forgiving than I am, you can at least see how progressives are performative to the point of caricature — think of the those land acknowledgements that have reclaimed millions of acres of college campuses and community theaters for Native Americans, or how enforced pronoun declarations in group settings and email footers make people with bad haircuts feel comfy because that’s a hill worth dying on.
But if you’re anywhere close to my politics, you’ll see progressivism as the new eugenics. They sort winners from losers based on their bodies. Now toss in antisemitism. What could go wrong?
You would think I would have railed against this earlier as I cozied up to a New Yorker magazine, but it took a war in Israel in 2023 an election for Trump in 2024 to make the point.
I won’t miss this leftist culture. I think Trump’s win means that, by and large, the country agrees with me even if I didn’t vote with them. The tragedy of course is that this rejection of the left is a zero-sum win for the right. It now means the Federal government will embrace anti-immigrant scapegoating and do nothing to stop gun violence that massacres children, never mind addressing rising infant mortality in red states, maintaining the separation of church-and-state and reducing pollution.
But that’s the deal with a two-party, winner-take-all system with a Senate, Electoral College and congressional gerrymandering. To update Winston Churchill, America has the worst form of democracy, but it’s all we’ve got.
How about we do our best with the cards we’re dealt? It’s not a great slogan, but it’s a good way of life.
Economic populism won
The other silver lining is that economic populism is a proven winner. No Republican will ever again run like Mitt Romney. Likewise, no Democrat, praise God, will ever again say “the economy” is fine — whatever that is and however it’s measured by whomever is the wealthy analyst — while most people can’t afford homes, cars, childcare, college, healthcare or, you know, food.
average cost of a car in 2024: $48,000
average cost of public college tuition with room and board: $25,000
That took me under a minute to Google. In less than a second I can guess most Americans don’t have $73,000 burning a hole in their pocket. I like to think I’m smart, but I’m honestly not sure how I just beat the entire Democratic Party in political economics in 61 seconds.
How bitterly ironic it is that the No Penis & No Privilege Warriors are the very same people who also champion economic populism, and how incredible it is that the winner of their same message is Donald Trump?
What does this inversion tell the social justice folk? Sure, they can fulminate that they were correct all along, but if so, why haven’t they won a Democratic presidential nomination since Jimmy Carter in 1976, excepting primary blips for Howard Dean in 2004 and Bernie Sander in 2016? (Hats off to Vermont!)
Hint: it’s because not enough people in the party vote for them. If you want to blame party elites for not supporting them behind the scenes, then they’re in the wrong party.
More importantly, if the Squad were right all along to support blue collar workers, then why don’t those workers support them? Why did Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman lose their primaries this year? Why is it that Ritchie Torres, an Afro Latino gay man born into poverty, which should make him a golden idol of DEI worship and a MacArthur genius grant winner for simply waking up each morning, left the Progressive Congressional Caucus and is now ascendant as a pro-Israel activist?
What happens to intersectionality when we learn the road map is actually scribbles?
Winners and losers
I’m not terrified of the incoming Trump administration. I think it’ll be a disaster and riddled with incompetent grifters. I think Trump will do nothing to help working people. He won’t develop our national infrastructure and he will completely fall apart when disaster strikes with bad weather, bad people and bad pathogens. He’ll be terrible and then he’ll be gone. It’s more frustrating and embarrassing than something to fear.
But I’m thankful for the chance to see the emperor has no clothes. It’s just not the emperor we thought.