We aren't fucked, but it's bad.
A very brief analysis of post-election rhetoric and what needs to be done.
This is another interstitial post coming in the middle of my discussion of Silicon Valley billionaires and ideological transition. I mostly stayed off the Internet yesterday, but I definitely saw stuff that demanded to be addressed.
In talking about post-election rhetoric, I fully realize - Communication professor at work here - I am adding to the noise. The narrative of this election is still being crafted by media both mainstream and social - certain groups are emboldened; you all know who they are - in the various discussions of Kamala's failings and general Democratic party ineptitude. However much I appreciate slowing down and being thoughtful, it’s important to jump on this now before it has been carved in stone. It’s what they are doing and we cannot cede the narrative to them.
Why did Trump win? I don’t think this has one answer. Science likes simple explanations - at least that what they teach you in science class (things have gotten weird in the Physics world). Areas in the social sciences - sociology and history notably – instead engage in complex, multifaceted explanations. Why did Germany lose World War II? You can argue for one or two core things, but in truth, there were probably hundreds of reasons. Similarly, there is not one reason Trump won and Harris lost, there are likely hundreds. We could in theory say there is "one reason per person" if we imagine a potential, not-yet-researched relationship between neurodivergence and (for example) opinion leadership. But in lieu of this, we just can say “the reasons are complex and overdetermined” and start a list.
I have two quick (for me) comments about post-election rhetoric.
If your explanatory narrative does not discuss demographics, it is not worth the electricity you spent in the 30 seconds it took you to write it. Both parties are thinking very carefully, and throwing a lot of money and brain power, into marketing their ideas and candidates to various demographic groups. If you've decided that the election was lost because Kamala was too left, or too right, or ignored this or that issue, but you aren’t analyzing actual voting demographics, you have wasted our time. Nobody in marketing - and politics is all about marketing – does anything without thinking about demographics. And this is marketing’s Super Bowl: the US presidential election. If you are throwing your weight behind a "the DNC should have done X" argument, you better also have the research on how that X will target specific groups who might vote for Democrats, and why the DNC did something different. Otherwise it’s just empty noise.
Second, and you get a sense of this from the above. If you believe that the Republicans are engaging in authoritarian tactics and propaganda - which I do - why are you blaming the Democrats? Why aren't you blaming the party using authoritarian tactics and propaganda? If you further believe - and this is more controversial, although it shouldn’t be - that the Republicans are utilizing (barely) updated Nazi concepts and ideology - why are you blaming the group who aren’t Nazis? Shouldn’t you be blaming the actual Nazis? We don’t look at Hitler and say “he had millions of Jews killed because of his fee-fees.” Nor do we say “why didn’t the opposition party use a less (or more) woke candidate.” We say “Hitler was insane and his ideology was murderous and terrible.”
What is clear, and this is a bit of a TLDR to my next 10-or-so posts, is that the Nazi Party that ran Germany may have been defeated, but their techniques and ideologies were not. Some of these ideas have, in my humble opinion, become mainstream without most of us noticing. For example, it is no longer unacceptable to espouse ideas based on racial superiority. Sure, you’ll be batted down and forced into niche groups if you say overt things like “white people are superior to other races,” but barely-disguised rhetoric like this is common on gaming discords and social media.
If I’m right about this – and I think I am or I wouldn’t have started this substack – we have a lot of work to do. The other side has more money, they (apparently) have more able marketers, and they control enough mainstream and social media outlets to dominate (or at least gish gallop) any topic. They have thrown their weight behind an outmoded political philosophy most of us thought was defeated, and what’s more, they know it, and they are certain they are right. We thought we were fighting post-Capitalism, neoliberalism, or economic inequality; my readers, I’m afraid the situation is more dire than this. We’re going to have to defeat Nazism first. It’s going to be a long fight with a lot of losses; that much is apparent.
I like your approach, especially that you’re calling out the weird victim-blamey thing that’s seems to be happening, which I suspect is really just because people like to imagine we live in a just world, which we can hang onto if we can figure out “what the democrats did wrong.” Anyway, one question I have is about fundraising. You mention money in this post, but my understanding was that the democrats way out-performed Republicans in fundraising, so is raising more money really the answer? What kind of money?
Thank you for your straightforward approach here. I have been lamenting this knee-jerk "whose fault is it" rhetoric that has dominated since Wednesday morning. My $.02: yes, we have to tackle Nazism, and part of doing that is recognizing why so many "decent" people will step back and let Nazis take over. I listened yesterday to a podcast about fear; it was recorded several years ago. In it, one of the primary topics was how we, in Eurocentric cultures, often default to expressing fear as anger, because 1) fear does, very often, naturally turn into anger because that is evolutionarily advantageous; react to a threat by becoming aggressively threatening yourself. 2) fear is seen as weakness in our culture. We have been socialized (depending on positionality) to express fear as either helplessness/submissiveness or aggressive hostility. I believe that therefore, if we are not self-aware enough to acknowledge and name our fear, we are very likely to unconsciously turn it into a focused anger that leads us to believe the way to relieve the stress is to identify who is to blame. If we continue like this, everybody who is stuck in "whose fault is it mode" will, if given the chance, turn that focus on easily identifiable marginalized demographics because they are the easiest targets. And we arrive where we are now.