This post is about the Election. As with all my posts, it’s going to be pretty rambly. But I’m splitting this one into three sections to hopefully bring a bit more cohesion. Part I discusses my gut reaction to the election results and the sense of providence that I think was shattered by the outcome. Part II is about some of the specific outcomes that we saw from the returns, including a brief discussion of South Texas. Finally, Part III is my appraisal of the wider trends underlying the rise, and fall, of President Trump — and why I think we need to be deeply worried about our democracy.
Before I get into the meat of the post, I want to make two caveats. First, I’m not going to reference exit polling data from 2020 — there’s compelling reason to believe that those data are inaccurate and thus unhelpful for narrating the election results. Second, if this piece seems more rambly than the others, it’s because I’m still very muddled in my thinking, and I’d love for folks’ insight and critique.
I. On Providence in American Politics
“Don’t say you’re too tired to fight / It’s just a matter of time / Up there’s the finish line, / And run, and run, and run.”
—Taylor Swift, “Only the Young”
Among progressives, I think there was a sense that we’d have a moment of reckoning with this Election: that the protests for racial justice, that the energy among the young and people on the Left in organizing, that the polls showing consistent Biden leads, and that the shambolic handling of the pandemic in America would culminate in an election that strongly denounced the current Administration. I think this sense of providence goes back in the Democratic Party — I suspect the idea of a “post-racial” America had cachet not only among White conservatives but also White liberals who hoped Barack Obama could, indeed, usher in a time where “there is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there is the United States of America.” Providentialism inheres in the idea of demographic destiny, that Republicans “will be hard-pressed to be competitive in national elections in a decade or two” merely because the proportion of the citizen voting-age population that is White is decreasing. And, indeed, it goes back in our national heritage. Tocqueville observed that in democratic societies, “the image of an ideal and always fugitive perfection is presented to the human mind.” Underlying the frenzied and manic behavior of Americans was a deep-seated faith in progress.
The danger with ideas of providence is that they lend themselves to a kind of apathy, since we believe the dawn of a new age is always upon us. To the providentialist, time, alone, will work wonders — the new age, ushered in by a young generation, will sweep away the shackles of the past to bring forth a better era. We may be stuck for a rough few years as we wait for that time to come, since we have a careening system designed to “refine . . . the public views” through representatives who “may best discern the true interest of their country” and avoid “sacrific[ing] it to temporary . . . considerations.” Tocqueville recalls talking to a sailor and asking him why American boats were poorly built. The response was that “the art of navigation makes such rapid progress daily that the most beautiful ship would soon become almost useless if its existence were prolonged beyond a few years.” Better, in the American’s mind, to continue shoddily muddling along until we invariably reach the promised land.
Providentialism in politics, of course, is absurd. We know it’s absurd. Things don’t naturally improve without hard work and dedication. But Tocqueville’s Americans also recognized the absurdity of providence. In the America he witnessed — that frenetic society of bustling and hustling — there were, of course, failures, and setbacks, and retrogression. In the face of those failures, the American “understands only too well that a people or an individual however enlightened he may be, is not infallible.” But sometimes changes work. And in those moments, Tocqueville observed, the American “concludes from this that man in general is endowed with the indefinite faculty of perfecting himself. His reverses make him see that no one can flatter himself with having discovered the absolute good; his successes inflame him to pursue it without respite.” Tocqueville’s insight was that one could simultaneously face failure, often repeated, yet continue to hold a deep-seated faith in the fundamental goodness of the future. It’s that kind of enduring, almost absurd optimism that can lead Obama, who must have felt so personally shaken by the election of his successor and so relentlessly attacked during his time in office, to write: “I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America[.]”
But providence is not just absurd in the abstract. Our best understanding of our current politics suggests that it is deeply divided and rancorous; that people are so locked in their beliefs that our views on politics are no longer responsive to changing circumstance, even environmental shocks such as a pandemic; that we have become not only divided in terms of policy preference, but that we see each other as enemies to be beaten rather than fellow citizens with whom to deliberate. Numerous trends identified by political scientists should have suggested that this election would be close. We know our elections are highly nationalized, with high rates of partisan loyalty. We know that most people’s views of the President are baked in, and hence his approval ratings have been extremely stable. And we know that our politics are polarized not only in terms of ideology but also affect (i.e., that people dislike and fear the opposite party). All of those factors suggest that the amount of people willing to change their vote from 2016 ought to be miniscule.
The value of fundamentals-based elections forecasts and the political scientists’ long-view of the political order is that they help us bound our expectations. Polling data from this cycle were systematically off and very much underestimated support for the President, just as they did in 2016. And while I disagree with the idea that the polls are unhelpful — Nate Silver’s analysis is enlightening — I think I too readily bought the idea that polling errors were equally likely in either direction (i.e., that a Biden +12 outcome was just as likely as a Biden +4 outcome). One forecast based on fundamentals — that there’s an incumbent on the ticket who was relatively unpopular and who had a robust economy until the pandemic hit — suggested that Biden should’ve had something like a 60% chance of winning the Electoral College. The strength of negative polarization, similarly, ought to caution us against the possibility of landslides. Keeping those broader ideas in mind rather than being so caught up in the horse race, I think, would’ve helped me temper my dreams of flipping Texas or — more fantastically — Jaime Harrison or Amy McGrath taking seats in South Carolina and Kentucky.
To reject the providential view of our current politics requires a blunt recognition that our democracy is fragile and that our elections (and politics more broadly) will continue to be not just competitive but rancorously combative. The election was characterized broadly by continuity — very little seems to have changed in the electoral map. But let me spend a little bit of time thinking through two aspects of the contingencies in this election: one, the few things that did change; and two, how much we might attribute this to the figure of Trump versus the normal workings of partisanship.
II. Assessing the Change from 2016 to 2020
“The highest skill in forming dispositions is to be without form; formlessness is proof against the prying of the subtlest spy and the machinations of the wisest brain.”
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I think a useful place to start here is G. Elliott Morris’s map of counties and how much they changed between 2016 and 2020. At the top level, we’re seeing the intensification of a core trend from 2016: polarization based on place, so that the divides among rural, urban, and suburban voters really matter.
One interesting result is that we might be seeing a decline in racial polarization. If so, I think that would actually be a great boon to democracy. Perhaps the most important norm of democracy is the equal inclusion of all people within the polity, but we’ve seen over the last few decades a partisan disagreement over those questions, where the Republican Party has systematically attempted to make voting harder — to effectively disenfranchise Democratic-leaning groups, often disproportionately burdening racial minorities (especially Black Americans). Republican Party leaders are, I think, largely rational actors; they’re doing this not necessarily out of some malice, but rather, out of a strategic calculus that manipulating the terrain of the political battleground can enable seemingly legitimate victory despite the fundamentally anti-democratic action of intentionally trying to prevent their opponents from ejecting them from office. Insofar as Republicans begin to believe that they ought to try to compete for Black people’s votes rather than to try to disenfranchise them, depolarization could be a stabilizing force against democratic backsliding.
In terms of specific movement, it seems like really interesting changes happened in South Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. I won’t write about all of them, although here are some good things to look into: on organizing in Georgia, see here, and here; on Arizona, consider this piece on Native American organizers, this piece largely about Hispanic organizers, and this piece about Never Trumpers and John McCain’s legacy; I’ve also found UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative Twitter to have some helpful data for thinking through these races.
In South Texas, there were several heavily Hispanic counties that decisively broke for Trump. Clinton won Starr and Hidalgo counties by sixty and forty points — Biden won them by five and seventeen, respectively; Zapata County, going for Clinton by over thirty points in 2016, flipped to Trump, who got 52.5% of the vote. (Note that precinct-based analysis of the major cities in Texas suggest that Biden won the vast majority of Hispanic votes in the major cities in Texas.)
One way to think about this result is that it's a product of a growing urban/rural divide, or it’s a subset of divisions relating to religiosity or culture (e.g., guns). But that doesn’t seem to explain why these places especially seemed to flip compared to in 2016. The magnitude of the flip suggests we need a more contextual analysis.
One in-depth study of Hispanic political engagement in Texas was based on hundreds of long interviews with people, and it had a case study of the Rio Grande Valley that I found really interesting. The study found a few deeply ingrained ideas among its interviewees: a cynicism toward politics due to extensive corruption and a “compadrazgo” relationship among politicians, who all seem to have each other’s backs; a personalized politics, where candidates, not issues, matter (“particularly in Brownsville, they compared local races to high school elections, with people running based only on name and popularity”); and extreme poverty leading to a concern that politics simply doesn’t do anything for most people (81–84). Moreover, throughout Texas, they found Hispanic voters tended to have weak partisan and ideological identification, even among those who tended to vote consistently for a given party (4).
All of those signs suggest that many of these folks would be susceptible to moving en masse in different directions because: (1) they feel a sense of political efficacy associated with their vote (which the study found was heightened during the pandemic, because they felt like government materially affected their lives, see 5); and (2) there is a “kind of moral damage, a deeper, generalized public distrust that affects the way Latinos in [San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley] relate to politics” (77), paving the way to a populist appeal with few constraints based on prior political identification. One of the reasons why polling might have been systematically biased this cycle is due to differential willingness to respond to polls based on social trust; those with low social trust, the theory goes, skew toward Trump while being less likely to respond to calls (or, vice versa, energized liberals who trust our institutions were more willing to respond to polls). If so, I think we are liable to miss this kind of organizing by focusing on mass data rather than listening to community organizers who see and hear what goes on in the grassroots.
III. On Trump and Trumpism
“[O]ur political engagement is often a seething, partisan sort. A why-don’t-we-kidnap-the-governor-of-Michigan kind of engagement. People speak in the vapid vernacular of the partisan internet. We are quicker to see enemies than we are to see persuadable minds or future allies. We are a cynical bunch, not very sure that we ever had much in common in the first place.”
—Clare Malone, “How Trump Changed America”
I think the big question mark for me after the election was trying to figure out how to think about the results — should I be disappointed? elated? fearful? hopeful? I’m still not sure, but I think we shouldn’t overinterpret the result in terms of “73 million people support Donald Trump’s [insert bad characteristic].” Long-term trends suggest that the beliefs he advocates for, even if held by some of his supporters, are malleable, and that his support is largely attributable to partisan identification rather than support for him as an individual. Both ideas suggest that he could be replaceable by a normal Republican and many characteristics of the election would’ve been similar. That being said, I do think he has wreaked havoc on our constitutional order and that the blame is attributable to Republican elites who have failed to line up in defending our democracy.
I think at the top level, we can be relatively certain of three ideas: (1) many people, perhaps most, are not consistent ideologues, and partisan signals are extremely powerful for much of the electorate; (2) partisanship is a kind of social identity, which means imaginations of each party’s coalition have compelling effects on voting behavior independent of the party’s leadership; and (3) race is an important part of the story. Let me break each of those statements down.
Ideology and the Power of Partisanship. Empirical evidence suggests that higher awareness of politics correlates with higher issue consistency — that is, people who write and think about politics tend to be more coherently liberal or conservative across issues (e.g., Barber & Pope 2019, 41). But many people don’t think about politics that much. For them, electoral politics might be a once-every-few-years issue, since voting is their most obvious way of exercising power; or voting is a marginal activity, an aspect of good citizenship that ultimately bears little value personally or to the community (since an individual vote has a very low chance of mattering); or maybe they’re just disenchanted by the rancor in politics and thus disengage from even thinking about politics. This distinction in ideological coherence — what David Shor characterizes as the “single biggest way” that politicos are different from people who care less about politics — has two effects, I think.
First, it amplifies the power of partisanship. Experimental evidence suggests that for low-political-knowledge partisans, cues from political leaders are especially effective at swaying their views (Barber & Pope 2019, 45 fig. 2). That being said, there are contrary studies that argue that ideological distinctions do, in fact, undergird partisan differences. Steven Webster and Alan Abramowitz, in a 2017 paper, argued that partisans have become more ideologically homogeneous over time when measured by their responses to questions about social welfare (specifically, four questions: “government aid to Blacks, government versus private health insurance, government versus personal responsibility for jobs and living standards, and the tradeoff between government services and taxes,” 628). Webster and Abramowitz showed that views on social welfare correlate with “thermometer ratings” — basically, how “warmly” do a respondent feels toward a certain group — and thus argued that the rise in affective polarization (where partisans feel emotional distaste, or even hatred, for members of the other party) stems in part from ideological differences (see 632 tabl. 2; 634 tabl. 4; 638 tabl. 5). But Webster and Abramowitz measured a specific aspect of ideology rather than measuring someone’s views across policy questions. Even if it’s true that views on social welfare are more coherent over time, it’s not necessarily the case that other ideological views have fallen in line. And that matters because the external environment and political campaigns both work to selectively emphasize particular issue areas: emphasis on immigration, the pandemic, the economy, health care, racial justice, international relations, and so on, will vary based on the election cycle. So even if we can show certain ideological underpinnings of differences among partisans, I think the empirical evidence is still compelling that people on the whole are not ideologically cohesive and therefore are swayable by partisan appeals.
Second, I think the gap between the politico’s and everyday American’s views on politics means that we can get a very distorted view of politics by focusing on news or Twitter. Fundamentally, voting is an irrational behavior — people have minuscule probabilities of flipping an election, and while the margin of victory matters for how we think about an outcome (consider what this post would’ve looked like if Biden had won by 12 points!), an individual vote won’t shift that margin appreciably. I think people are driven to vote either by a kind of civic duty or because of social pressure. (Note that these two forces probably intersect — you likely feel stronger attachments to your civic duty to vote if everyone around you is doing it and you’re seeing consistent signals from your friends about the importance of voting!) If that’s correct, then it’s probably important to think through how people get pushed to vote, and by whom they’re induced to do so. If your pastor urges you to vote for Trump, and you’re a highly religious person who doesn’t follow politics much and isn’t a partisan, does it say all that much that you voted for Trump? Non-voters, I want to emphasize, certainly have views on politics; Tocqueville thought politics was our common language, and he marveled at how every American, in the time of an election, could speak like a parliamentarian about the issues of the day. Ask anyone on the street (even in the UK!) and they’ll have thoughts about President Trump, or President-elect Biden, or Obamacare. But that doesn’t mean they’re not persuadable, especially when they’re pushed to vote by a targeted prod.
In that sense, then, I suspect Biden would have been able to have a substantially larger margin if he simply did rallies and continued canvassing, rather than (responsibly!) avoiding traditional campaigning due to the pandemic. It also means that there are many channels — churches and WeChat group chats, 4chan and One America News — that traditional media and political scientists may only haphazardly be picking up on but that facilitate the mobilization and politicization of many folks. As campaigns get more sophisticated with targeted advertising and as our media fragments ever further (I did not expect, for example, the rise of an even more Trumpy television outlet than Fox News), I think traditional punditry will become more and more divorced from electoral outcomes because our social circles are simply more homogeneous, closed, and under-the-radar.
The upshot, then, is I think people’s votes are a largely ambiguous signal, that mobilization through the grassroots probably says more than ideological explanations about why Trump lost and yet Republican turnout was so high, and that many ideological undercurrents of our political debates can be shaped by partisan elites.
Partisanship as Social Identity. When we talk about how polarized our politics are, I think we tend to link that to a notion of gridlock — not just of policy stasis in Congress due to its inability to pass legislation, but also of partisan stasis, where people don’t move between parties. The Michigan School of partisanship, for example, says that party identification is a social and group-based phenomenon, and that one’s partisanship is stable and controls policy beliefs — as Lilliana Mason explains in Uncivil Disagreement, “partisans are inclined to cling to their own party, seeing it through rose-colored glasses. The real outcomes of government, and a person’s opinions about those outcomes, take a back seat to the central importance of seeing the inparty as better than the outparty. As long as the inparty is winning, partisans will have little motivation to stray” (54).
I think this oversells the stability of party coalitions; we do see appreciable movement between the parties, which suggests that party identification isn’t the only thing that matters in our politics. The obvious examples recently are the movement of the suburbs — especially highly educated White women living in the suburbs — into the Democratic Party, while non-college educated White people, especially those living in rural areas, have moved more appreciably into the Republican Party. Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal, in White Backlash, similarly showed a broader movement of Whites into the Republican Party since the 1970s, which is traceable to opposition to unauthorized migration. But I think the bigger moving factor isn’t necessarily ideological (that would be roughly the Downsian School of partisanship — that people choose their party based on their values). Rather, party attachment is about the dynamics of who the party comprises. After all, the “party” itself does not exist materially; as Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood put it in a 2018 paper, “we cannot literally meet the party” (965). People instead hold stereotypes — usually wildly wrong — about the composition of the parties. Ahler and Sood found, for example, that Americans believed that 32% of Democrats are gay, lesbian, or bisexual (when only 6.3% were) and that 38% of Republicans earned over $250,000 a year (in contrast to 2.2%) (965). Moreover, they were able to show that the amount of bias in those estimates predicted animus toward the other party — and that an intervention informing people about the relative size of these coalitions can reduce such animus (975–76).
If Ahler and Sood are correct in this understanding of parties as imagined social coalitions, then partisan identification is a sliding scale based on how well our different social identities match with the party’s imagined identities. Mason and another colleague, for example, showed that the number of cross-cutting identities that a partisan holds affects how much he or she identifies with the party: a Republican who is non-White or non-Christian tends to be less attached to the Republican Party than a Republican who is both. The result: “[P]arty-group alliances drive people toward a broader sense of political identity that isn’t limited to any one issue or group, but inspires greater partisan loyalty among the most socially sorted partisans” (Mason & Wronski 2018, 260). Shifting perceptions of partisan coalitions, therefore, might be an important driver for actual movements in party identification.
There are a few implications of this theory. First, it suggests that media coverage will have a self-perpetuating effect on our politics. The more that we talk about suburban women moving to the Democratic Party, the more likely it is that we’ll see greater alignment of those groups moving forward. But it also means that we need to be watchful of media fragmentation — who are the audience for various media outlets (such as One America News, Fox News, or MSNBC) and how do they imagine the parties’ coalitions?
Second, this fragmentation should warn Democrats about their ability to maintain support among racial minorities. It’s not enough, in other words, that Democratic elites imagine themselves to be the party of the minority; it’s not enough to think that people will simply assume the Republican Party is a party of White nationalists; it’s not enough to believe that policy differences on, e.g., voting rights, healthcare, and income inequality are sufficient to deter people who would be harmed by those policies from voting for the Republican Party. When anchors of community begin to identify with a certain group, and when they spin the party in a certain way, that can easily shift folks’ imagination of the party — especially since many people are not strong partisans.
To be sure, we ought to be careful in thinking through who the “face” of the Republican Party and Democratic Party are. Barber and Pope (2019, 43) tested the effect of being told about President Trump’s views on various policies versus being told about Republican congressional leadership’s views, and they found that President Trump’s views were influential for Republicans but that Republican congressional leaders’ weren’t. I don’t think that evidence means that only the standard bearer (Biden or Trump) can shape people’s views of the party. Rather, I think it points to trust as the filtering mechanism for whether people are willing to listen and change their minds. Party leaders for partisans have that effect, but obviously so too will community leaders. That Republicans in Congress can’t shape those opinions is worrying from a constitutional perspective — our Constitution’s presidentialist system splits sovereignty and legitimacy between two elected branches, but this finding might suggest that only one of those branches (the President) commands meaningful legitimacy — but it doesn’t disprove the theory of partisanship as a social identity.
The Enduring Importance of Race. There’s compelling political science that demonstrates that racial resentment was a crucial sorting mechanism for whether White people voted for Clinton or Trump. For example, while education seems to be a strong factor splitting White voters in 2016 — those with college degrees broke for the Democratic nominee by 11 points more than they did in 2012, and those without college degrees broke for the Republican nominee by 12 points more in 2012 — Abramowitz and McCoy (2019) showed that the different in education is almost entirely explained by measures of White racial resentment (141 tabl. 1; 146 fig. 1). (If you’re interested, here’s the set of questions surveyors ask to measure racial resentment.)
To be sure, there is genuine resentment and mourning among people who support President Trump that I don’t think is simply because they’re racist. In part, I think that’s a counterproductive way of thinking about political opponents (not unlike the flag that some supporters of the President have been waving: “Fuck Your Feelings”). But also, I think the linkage of resentment to race doesn’t imply that contemporary White working-class resentment is reducible to race. Think back to Webster and Abramowitz’s claim that social welfare policies are both long-standing and fundamental to contemporary polarization (both ideological and affective). I think they’re right, in essence, that questions of distributive fairness matter, and that people do hold those ideas tightly. But I also think those ideas can be racialized even if they are also grounded in some more fundamental political theory.
For one, I think people’s self-image is tied to how much they see themselves as dependent on others or the state. The American ethos is that of the “frontiersman” — that mythic ideal of self-dependence, either by oneself or with one’s family, and surviving by the fruits of one’s labor on the frontier. It wasn’t that long ago that Obama spoke about how people “in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks . . . don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead — and they want to.” If Americans resist “socialism” today, it is, I think, because many do hold fundamentally that they ought to fend for themselves within reasonable bounds and that they don’t want “government handouts.” It is a kind of raw understanding of just outcomes, where one reaps what one sows. I don’t think that idea is simply a cover for racism; I think most Americans do genuinely hold those beliefs.
But people’s resentment about the failure of that American Dream can be tied to race. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land is illuminating in this respect. In that book, she repeatedly returns to the metaphor of “waiting in line” to help us understand the psychology of Tea Party Republicans in Louisiana. For the people she talked with — many of whom were of lower socio-economic status and were plagued by environmental disasters that have ruined a land they had lived on for generations — the American Dream was a very real idea: through hard work and self-dependence, one could find a better livelihood, and all the American Dream required was to wait in line. There’s a kind of providential aspect to this understanding of life — that our system is fundamentally just and will lead to just outcomes given enough time and hard work. Hochschild shows that these folks become resentful — they begin to feel like strangers in their own land — because they see others (immigrants, women, Black people) cutting in front of them rather than waiting for their fair share. This kind of sociological evidence is, of course, anecdotal. But I do believe that there’s something deeply correct in Hochschild’s analysis, a generalizable idea that helps us recognize why social welfare questions — distributional questions of resources in our society — are so tied to questions of race.
If this kind of economic resentment transcends, while being entwined with, race, then it enables us to see why economic resentment might be a powerful campaign mechanism for Republicans to reach voters of color — especially ones who feel left behind, like Hochschild’s White Louisianan Tea Partiers. In my view, and in I suspect many (White) Democratic Party elites’ views, there is a deep tension in the President’s willingness to embrace White nationalists and also his seeming capacity to have won people of color with higher margins than he did previously. I think the analytical flaw in that assessment is that the centrality of race in explaining politics doesn’t imply that race controls political behavior. Parties are filled with internal contradictions: the Republican Party of Mitt Romney, for example, had to balance the pro-business, libertarian-leaning, pro-immigration wing of the party with the cultural and social conservatives who wanted greater religious orthodoxy in politics and opposed globalization, and it did so for decades through a strategy of “fushionism.” Is it possible that racialized, even racist, appeals continue to be part of the Republican Party and that more people of color vote for that party? Yes, much in the same way that some 15% of Muslim voters supported Donald Trump’s candidacy, one that opened with calling for a ban of Muslims from traveling to the United States. We each hold a multiplicity of identities, and the relative importance of those different identities might help us understand why someone seems to “vote against their own interest.” (This also helps us understand the Mason and Wronski finding that the greater alignment one has between different identities and party identity implies stronger attachment to partisanship.) We must recognize the role that race plays in shaping people’s behavior without presupposing that race will determine the behavior of all Americans.
Those three factors — the power of partisanship as it interacts with ideology, the idea of partisanship as a social identity, and the role of race — are all structural dynamics far beyond the President himself. But their culmination enabled this President to torch important parts of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy rests on certain underlying values: the rule of law, the legitimacy of one’s opposition, the right of all members of the polity to equally participate in our system, a free press, mutually agreed upon truths, and so on.
Those values clearly aren’t sufficiently reinforced by the people, who are happy to cheer on the President when musing about imprisoning his political opponents, demonizing the press, or alleging without factual basis the pervasiveness of voter fraud to delegitimize the results of an election. But we shouldn’t have expected those liberal democratic values to be preserved by the people. Substantive victory — or even symbolic victory, divorced from policy outcomes — matters much more to people than the structural integrity of our constitutional order. Indeed, if the constitutional order is supposed to enable the opposition to win, and if the opposition is deemed to be evil, then why bother preserving this order?
A crucial purpose of a republican form of government is to enable stewards of the constitutional order to preserve its long-term stability in the face of democratic impulses that would serve to undermine the integrity of the system. This requires action on the part of political elites — a willingness to defend our constitutional order before it is lost. For, as Lieberman and colleagues note, “[w]hen politicians no longer observe such norms, the checks and balances of American political institutions are not self-executing” (2019, 475).
This is a point that is worth emphasizing. These last few weeks, and the next month, are times of immense danger for our democracy. The fundamental norm of democratic governance is that we believe in the legitimacy of elections and safeguard the transfer of power. The President has long signaled that he was skeptical of the legitimacy of elections — we should remember that he discounted the legitimacy of an election that he won in 2016, falsely claiming that millions of people voted illegally against him — and now is trying to refuse an orderly transition to the President-elect. I am hopeful that our institutions will hold. Courts have almost uniformly, for example, rejected the President’s borderline-frivolous lawsuits. But the greater the proportion of people who listen to him — and the more that Republican leadership enables him — the higher the risk of elections-related violence and long-term harm to the stability of our constitutional order. We aren’t going to see meaningful solutions on this front from the people; we’re too divided, too comfortable with constant lies, to be able to distinguish reality from illusion. The corollary is that we will continue to enable leaders who shirk fundamental democratic norms if they become party nominees.
Where do we go from here? The path forward, I think, rests almost exclusively in the hands of the political parties. Democratic governance rests on responsible party elites, and those elites need to consider their allegiance to fundamental democratic tenets. The Democratic Party has for the most part held the line, but it needs to resist calls for prosecution of Donald Trump after he leaves office and other such retributive policies. The demonization of political opponents enables cascading deleterious effects, and the Democratic Party must resist going up the escalation ladder. And even more, the Republican Party needs to clean house. Party elites must focus on cultivating leadership that respects democratic traditions, and they must channel their voters’ discontent toward substantive rather than procedural questions.
To be sure, one might say that the Republican Primary in 2016 demonstrated that the party tried and failed to be a responsible gate keeper. (Remember how Lindsey Graham once told Trump to “go to hell” and that Trump was “not fit to be President”?) The conventional logic today is that Trump activated tapped into a dormant authoritarianism (see, e.g., MacWilliams 2016, 719 fig. 1) — that people who seek authority and order, and who dislike diversity and “the other,” rose up to back Trump over the other Republican candidates. The thesis of the authoritarian voter theory is that threats activate latent authoritarianism; it is no accident, then, that Trump arose when fears of terrorism in the United States were at their highest point since September 11. The evidence is, I think, convincing but not sufficient. For example, we might expect latent authoritarianism to also be at their height during a pandemic — yet we have evidence that conservatives fear the pandemic less than liberals do (see Conway et al. 2020 [working paper]). I suspect two stories can help bring these two logics together. First, authoritarianism might differentiate among Republicans, but between Republicans, Democrats, and independents, party identification may be the bigger explanation for why people vote the way they do. Second, threat perception is malleable; a trusted source can prime whether a threat is, in fact, a legitimate one. Here too, then, a responsible elite apparatus might be able to channel latent authoritarianism in favor of non-system-destructive ends.
Julia Azari and Marc Hetherington wrote in a 2016 paper about the parallels between that election and the election of 1896 — how these both seem to be times of enduring partisan loyalty and highly competitive elections characterized by national policy issues. They showed how rising populism in the Democratic Party — reaching its height under William Jennings Bryan, the party’s nominee in the presidential election — eventually became diffused into intra-party fights: “The lesson of the populist-progressive period is that when political conflict between the parties becomes polarized, the same polarizing issues tend to become divisive within parties as well” (107). With the rise of the Progressive movement, both the Democratic Party and Republican Party eventually aligned on various policy questions about, for example, the desirability of trust-busting and greater governmental regulation of the economy. Jill Lepore’s These Truths quotes Woodrow Wilson: “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is” (365). If the past is an indication of what’s to come, then we’d also expect populism to be the shock to our party system. My hope is that the parties adjust together, as they did in the early twentieth century, to fold in those forces in favor of a greater redistributive politics. My gut is that antitrust litigation, especially regarding big technology companies, progressive taxation, infrastructure investment, and nationalist trade policy must be the tools for realigning populism to be less democratically destructive. Such populism might, in turn, help salve the kind of resentment that has led to and continues to enable Trumpism.
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Rose: My flatmate and I went to a Chinese supermarket for the first time the other day, and it was quite a glorious experience. We found onions that weighed 0.8 kgs!
I also got to call and hang out with various old and new friends this last week, which was a fun time (and a welcome respite from the rest of my life this last week-and-a-half, which has been essentially reading and writing for class, for this blog, and for the letters on The Art of War). Here are some pictures from those walks.
Bud: I have to choose where I’m going to be next year soon, so it’ll be exciting to look at the options! Also, the flat just ordered a new shipment of books for our next letters/various reading groups, which are exciting. The next books, after Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, are DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Women. Plus Obama’s book will be out soon, and it’ll be fascinating to read that.
Thorn: Rising COVID rates in the U.S. are terrifying — stay safe and diligent, y’all!
Potential Future Topics:
* Behavioral economics and its way of thinking about human nature.