Tempted Towards Authoritarianism
Making Sense of the 2024 Election
Political analysis tends to operate from a rationalist, deterministic perspective. It sees a variety of forces acting on the electorate, which moves accordingly, like how gravity accelerates objects downward. What this misses is that individuals have agency and choose who to vote for in ways that defy this logic. They bear a level of culpability for those choices, which is often glossed over in a system where the voter decides.
I’m not going to indulge a common refrain on the right that the Democrats made them do it by being too hard on Donald Trump or being dismissive of their way of life or “Real America”. In the best interpretation, this argument surrenders agency to the Democratic Party. In the worst interpretation, it’s justifying a guilty conscience. In any case, it infantilizes voters and positions them as hapless victims of trends beyond their control. That is the attitude of a people primed for an authoritarian.
Because America is a democracy, our leaders are a good reflection of who we are as a people. You didn’t just vote for a blunt instrument to implement your preferred policies, but your representative to the world and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on earth. We said a lot about ourselves in this election.
I have less idealism about this country than before, and the values I have tried to live by seem not to be valued when choosing leaders. What is valued, it appears, is spectacle, arrogance, and acting with impunity. A man who embodies those things just became America’s leader again, and the next generation will take notes. When you celebrate bad behavior, you only get more of it. The Founder’s idea of setting up checks on the power-hungry, rather than assuming the best of our leaders, seems prescient.
Trump does not represent me and, as far as I'm concerned, deserves all the mockery and disrespect his behavior calls for. When many look at Trump, they see strength and a badass, while I see weakness and over-compensation. But, I accept that he will technically be the president of the United States again. Either way, he will be gone in four years at most, and no one else in the Republican party is remotely capable of holding together Trump’s coalition.
What this country needs, I’m afraid, is to face the consequences of this fully. Allow Trump to implement his agenda. 10% tariffs that will spike the price of consumer goods, health policy driven by anti-vaxxers, pardoning of participants in the January 6th riot, corrupt dealings with foreign governments, and abandoning Ukraine, a country single-handedly fighting Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
These were promises on the campaign trail, but, as with anything with Trump, his demonstrated lack of character means that many of these promises could be empty. The reality is, we can’t know exactly what he is going to do. To me, this makes the trade of overlooking his “personality” in favor of his “policies” a very risky one. Making someone like Donald Trump the most powerful man on the planet in exchange for policy favors is a Faustian bargain, and a naive one.
But, hate him or not, Donald Trump is now a singular figure in the history of the United States. He is only the second to win non-consecutive terms as president, and the first to do it as a convicted criminal. He has been impeached twice, adjudicated a rapist, has yet to concede his loss in 2020, and inspired an assault on the capitol to overturn said loss.
He has shown no remorse for those acts, and yet this has not stopped him from being returned to the White House. Calling him “Teflon Don” overstates the properties of Teflon.
Why Trump Won
Perception vs. Reality
One concerning issue is the disconnect between voter perceptions and reality. Violent crime rates are down from 2021, inflation is below the historic average, the stock market is at all-time highs, and illegal border crossings have plummeted since the 2022 midterms, which saw gains by the Democrats.
What changed? Joe Biden got old, for one thing. His first two years were historically productive, and Biden frequently appeared in public and gave several strong speeches campaigning against the Republicans. This gave way to a president who was often out of sight, protected by an inner circle careful not to give away his decline. After the first presidential debate, it was clear he could not handle campaigning for president while doing the job.
There was a general perception that the president and vice-president did not have strong reigns over the government, and this persisted throughout Harris’ campaign.
It is difficult for me to think of Trump as a strong leader. When he loses, as in 2020, he whines and persists until he gets his way. When campaigning, he eschews all grace and decorum, seeking to dominate and entertain. As a leader, he is thin-skinned, hates dissent, and viciously attacks others. But, this plays into an image of strength he has carefully cultivated and is apparently what you see if you aren’t paying close attention.
Trump has made a career out of careful branding, so it’s best to defer to him on the matter. Biden was successful in 2020 as an anti-Trump, coming across as a strong leader without character flaws. The Trump brand of masculinity appears to be very appealing to men across races. He improved his performance from 2020 with men across all demographics. In an electorate that now values this performative strength, Trump faced little opposition.
Considering Inflation
Globally, this was an election where incumbents fared poorly. The rate of inflation has come down, but voters are still struggling with previous price increases without a corresponding increase in wages. However, the United States is an outlier in that its economy is doing great overall compared to the rest of the world. 2% inflation and 4% unemployment are historically great numbers.
In exchange for installing Trump to improve an allegedly flailing economy, the country will potentially experience a series of new policies that will make things worse. A blanket 10% tariff would increase the price of most consumer goods overnight. In fact, that is what a tariff is designed to do: artificially increase the cost of imported goods to make domestically manufactured goods more competitive. Historically, free-market economist such as Milton Friedman have opposed tariffs, and this shows how significantly Trump has changed the orthodoxy of his party in just 8 years.
Justice for January 6th
Ever since the January 6th riot, the best course was for the Biden administration to come down like a hammer on everyone involved. This was both morally and politically the correct approach. At the time, it was clear to all but Trump’s most hardcore supporters that what had occurred was terrible and deserving of punishment. Justice demanded it, or the net result would be a two-tiered justice system where control of a politically powerful and potentially violent faction insulates one from the legal system.
The political reality needed to be acknowledged, and quickly locking up militia members and other participants first was necessary. However, the administration chose to bend over backward to appear impartial and choose slow, careful deliberation over speed. That was a mistake, and the Trump administration will show no such deference. What this did was leave, in the minds of uninformed voters, the impression that Trump must not have done anything too bad. The lack of signaling from those in authority guaranteed this.
Social Conservatism
Finally, there is a lingering social conservatism in America, and the United States is on balance a fairly conservative country among modern democracies. The Democrat’s focus on increasingly niche social issues as an activist progressive base took control of messaging was always going to be a problem. It was not in 2020, with Biden at the helm deliberately appealing to moderate and working-class voters. It was a problem this time.
Democrats were banking on support from two groups. Latinos, who supposedly were concerned with mass deportations, and women who were concerned with more restrictive abortion laws. Dobbs was decided over two years ago, and the shock of overturning Roe v. Wade has receded. Latinos also tend to be more socially conservative than other demographics and running on a platform emphasizing LGBT rights and abortion rights was not going to play well.
The New Mainstream Media
Economic anxiety, social conservatism, and deferred justice are all big-picture explanations. There are also more subtle shifts happening closer to home, even right in our pockets. Most voters now receive their news through a combination of online sources, particularly social media. Social media feeds are curated based on individual preferences, and there are no longer any objective, vetted sources of news. Rather than seek the truth, we are increasingly in our own bubbles.
In the absence of clarity of information, what wins out is emotion and personal circumstances. People vote on their pocketbooks and what they care about in their immediate environment. They will look to candidates who project confidence and help them organize the continuous firehose of information we are all faced with. In a world of growing threats and an inability to make sense of our world, doesn’t it sound nicer to just give away responsibility to others?
The soul of America was once animated by the love of freedom and escaping the rigid hierarchies of the old world. Those hierarchies were based on a social compact: give us power and we will take care of the big problems. They promised a different kind of freedom where we could focus exclusively on our own worlds. There is a price to be paid for that.