I Know What Happened

... or at least, I'm happy to present some analysis with appropriate pundit-level confidence.

I suspect that Jonathan is right, and legitimate verifiable explanations for 2024 voting patterns will take a long time for academics to properly suss out. But when has that ever stopped me? Here are a few things that stand out to me, with plenty more to be discussed later…

1.       Kamala Harris ran a very good campaign.  I’ve seen some takes arguing strongly otherwise, but I think those are takes and analyses told by proverbial idiots, signifying nothing. (There are, regardless, better and more apropos quotations from that same fifth act; nobody gives better “oh crap I’ve ruined everything’ dialog than Billy from Stratford. Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back! ) Harris did the best with the situation she inherited from her wildly unpopular boss, a characterization still not accepted by many Democrats, likely including Biden himself. Harris had to procede from the (demonstrably true) assumption that everybody thinks the Biden-Harris presidency sucks; it was far too late for her to address that perception effectively. That left her in a strange, self-contradicting campaign limbo, constantly getting asked questions such as “what will you do to lower prices” without an option of saying, truthfully, “nothing, you morons, inflation is right where we want it to be, it would be grossly irresponsible to cause deflationary pressures to this economy!” For just one example.

2.       It’s probably all Biden’s fault. OK, let me back up here. Many of us are, understandably or at least forgivably, piling all of our frustrations and angers upon whatever political bugbears we’ve carried around for years. The idiots saying it was all a bad Harris campaign were probably once passed over for a job by somebody who ended up advising Harris-Walz ’24. So, while I’m pretty sure that everything, including the end of the great American democratic experiment and the results of the MLB postseason, can be properly blamed on the personality foibles that have long bugged me about Joe Biden, I should probably give this take a little more thought, distance, and critical analysis.

3.       Psychopathic liars have an advantage in politics. As they do in many things. They are, it turns out, uniquely skilled at sensing what people want to hear and are willing to believe – a talent for which campaign professionals can earn quite good money without being a fraction as good as Donald Trump. The lack of equivalence between America’s two parties does not stem from the wording of New York Times op-ed headlines; it stems from one party having a leader who has spent decades developing the weird mental defect that allows him to tell mass audiences the exact outrageous untruth that allows them to believe, if they so wish, that immigrants are causing a massive violent crime wave, or that massive tariffs will be paid by exporters, or that there are no FEMA agents helping flood victims in North Carolina. I have known a great many pols and political advisors; most have been capable of deceit, none could pull off any of these psychotic lies as Trump does.

Trump’s pathological lying, of course, has proven so effective in the political sphere, that the entire GOP and its extensive affiliated messaging apparati have transformed into an amplifying echo chamber of his insane lies. This is all soulless and immoral, but awfully effective.

4.       Speaking of immoral, apparently we scapegoat again. As a Jewish kid in the 1970s, it was impressed upon me regularly that ‘scapegoating’ – the practice of laying blame for a society’s woes upon an identifiable minority – was one of the great recurrent evils of mankind’s history, and a moral failing that pretty much meant you were responsible for Holocaust-level evil. Is this no longer a term of shame and disgrace in our society? The GOP, and others, have never fully stopped scapegoating of course, but it was so clearly shameful one had to be coy about it. Now, it’s the entire explicit basis of the GOP’s case about America. Undereducated or not earning enough? DEI gave your deserved resources to undeserving Black people. High housing prices? Caused by Mexican immigrants. Government doesn’t seem to do enough for you? It’s because Democrats care more about queer-looking “they/them” than about “you.” And none of this is by accident: it is the deliberate, nefarious design of Democrats to hurt real Americans like you to benefit the scapegoats who are key to their bizarre political machinations. The old stereotype Jewish images from European media that we were shown in Hebrew School had no degree of subtlety on this cycle’s GOP advertisements.

OK that’s enough for now. Much more to come, of course; we’ll be analyzing this one for a long time.