Peter: This is the trouble with the public, they're fucking horrible!
Emma: Peter, you can't say the public are fucking horrible.
Peter: Yes, I can, I've met them.
- The Thick of It (2005)
Trigger warning. The following may contain foul language and references to sex and violence. It doesn't contain constructive ideas.
The right mental model turned out to be the second one. As a forecaster, I have no future. At least, I'm in good company.
This piece is not about going through the reasons why Kamala lost. The Biden-baggage. Biden stepping back from the race too late. Disappearing manufacturing. Inflation. Woke idiocy. Being a woman. Being too wishy-washy. The Big Lie. Craving for a strong-man, whatever. I read some of the hundreds of articles on the subject in the first three days and they were as convincing as they were sometimes contradicting.
Instead, I just want to rip a new one to two popular ideas.
To me, it all started with Brexit. After the British electorate decided it was better to be outside of something they didn't bother to inform themselves too much about, a long string of articles and public appearances followed from the Remainers. It invariably involved tearing of garments and offering mea culpas for the sins of the "liberal elite", that is, themselves. Ourselves. "We" abandoned and misunderstood the downtrodden working class. The spoils of globalization were unevenly distributed. Voices were not heard. Hubris and condescension prevailed. The pundits didn't offer evidence of this pervasive condescension the college-educated class supposedly directed toward the common people but assumed without question. Finding fault with the voters themselves was anathema, a sign of the exact bigotry and "elitism" that brought Brexit about.
It was and is tiring but in line with the Western liberal intellectual tradition of finding the root cause of every problem in ourselves and feeling perversely proud of being the bigger man by that. This will never change, and it admittedly has advantages as well. It enables us to learn from our mistakes and prevents us from whining about the "unjust" others, at the price of whining about our real or imagined shortcomings instead.
A conversation with a lefty colleague on the 6th of November by the water cooler might serve as an illustration. "Look. It must have been the inflation. For many, the price of food matters more than abstract concepts of democracy". Which meant: "You can't expect these poor fuckers to understand that trying to cheat and then instigating violence to stay in power after losing an election is much worse than expensive eggs." This is patronizing, condescending shit. The soft bigotry of low expectations.
So the first idiotic idea is that it's never the voters' fault. They are not responsible for their decisions, they are adults when their rights are concerned and children when their civic duties. "Do not judge, or you too will be judged". I'll return to this later.
The second idiotic idea is expressed in the subspecies of the articles described above. The opinion pieces about the "rational voter". According to them, the incomprehensibility of voters making objectively catastrophic decisions at the ballot box merely reflects our myopic view of the world and the arrogance of our perceived superiority. The voter always, always has her reasons which reflect her priorities which simply happen to differ from ours.
What's wrong with this view? Everything. It posits something obviously wrong and tries to sound sophisticated by contorting arguments to support the premise. People oftentimes smoke, drink too much, neglect their friends and families, gamble, forget to save for the future, skip physical exercise, etc. These are things they tend to regret later. There is no disagreement that these acts are not reasonable.
Yet, as the proposed narrative goes, whenever one of our fellow citizens steps into the voting booth, a divine spirit descends upon him. Suddenly he possesses wisdom not reflected by his normal acts in life. He finds a firm grasp on the bewildering complexities of our political and economic world and assesses them and his impending decision with perfect clarity. After a short moment of weighing the pros and cons dispassionately, he marks his choice on the ballot paper. He puts the pen down, he steps out of the booth. The befuddlement of everyday life returns, the memory of a moment of pure reason fades away.
Of course, there is no such divine spirit. If the act of voting is always rational, then every act is rational. The word itself is stretched into non-existence. If we have to pick one gross generalization over the other, the "everyone votes irrationally"-statement describes the world better than the opposite.
The apropos of the piece, of course, is the latest US election results.
The blameless, rational Americans elected a man who has decades of history of defrauding business partners and common people (fake charities, Trump University, etc). He came into politics by propagating birtherism to discredit the first black president of the United States, whom he regularly referred to as Barack Hussein Obama. He is a serial sex offender, who in 2023 finally got convicted for sexually abusing and defaming a woman. He is a blabbering idiot who is unable to string five sentences coherently together, claims that he is genius, and who never met a dictator he didn't like. He publicly encouraged people at his rallies to beat up protesters and dog-whistled to violence more than a few times. In private, he suggested shooting at BLM protesters and in public deploying the military against the "enemies of the people". His own hand-picked, hardcore Republican members of his cabinet refused to endorse him in 2024, called him "fascist", "fucking moron", "a very limited man", and "narcissistic liar", among other monikers. As president, he pardoned his criminal business partners, withheld military aid from an ally to force it providing dirt on his domestic political opponent, lied to the public about the pandemic, and spread misinformation about quack medicine causing the death of probably hundreds of thousands of Americans. In 2020, he tried to steal the election by creating false slates of electors, attempting to order the DOJ to declare the results invalid, then when everything else failed, egged on a mob to raid the Capital to stop certifying the votes, while watching the spectacle on TV. After leaving the office, he had dinner with white supremacists and private phone calls with Vladimir Putin, and he stole classified documents from the White House, stored them in his toilet, and refused to return them after repeated requests. In his reelection bid, he called immigrants "vermins" who "poison the blood of our country". After that, he won. If you had read this in a book in 2014, you'd have put it aside with disgust as Z-category fiction. In reality, this summary barely scratches the surface.
And he won decisively, in every demographic group. It's no longer 2016 with a clown for a candidate that promises entertainment. Voters had nine years to look at what was staring them in the eye and make up their minds. This is the most informed electorate in history. Whatever information they ignored, it was their choice. This is not a protest vote. Those who voted for Trump did it with their eyes wide open. This is what they want. Trump is what they want.
As a bloc, Trump voters have no defining characteristic. Some voted for him because of genuine adoration. Some wanted entertainment. Some saw him as a distasteful vessel to further their interest. Some as the lesser of two evils. Others just out of a lifelong habit of voting Republican. But one statement can be made about them: transported in 1930s Germany, these people would have elected Adolf Hitler.
Ah, I hear the instant gasps and the clutching for pearls. "You call half the country Nazis? What kind of language is that?"
Yes, I do. I call them Nazi voters because...wait... these people would have voted for the Nazis. Their arguments are by and large the same as the ones the old-time fascists used. Economic struggles, condescending elites, menacing far-left, lack of manly leadership in hard times. In defense of the Nazis of the past, at least they really faced a far-left threat and they lived in hard times. The new Nazis live in the richest country in the world in the plushest of times, harassed by imaginary foes. The swastika-loving masses were actually in it for some grand ideas instead of for one man's unashamed venal self-interest.
The overwhelming majority of Trump voters wouldn't want to build gas chambers, of course. Neither did the majority of Germans, I'm sure. Many of them surely were decent family men or women, kind to their neighbors and helpful to strangers. They were also captured by a horrible ideology or were civic imbeciles. Just like the people today.
"That might be correct, but throwing around the word 'Nazi' doesn't lead anywhere. It's not a constructive argument!". I agree, see the trigger warning above. It's not a constructive argument. But who said facts should always be constructive? There are many things in life we wish weren't so, and recognizing them does not help anyway.
Next time you step out to the street, partake in a class reunion, or you're in the company of your extended family, stop for a second to remind yourself just for a fleeting moment, to celebrate what you have at this particular moment of history by acknowledging that half of the people around you do not understand nor appreciate the values of freedom of speech, rule of law, or peaceful transfer of power. An uncomfortably large number of them would be happy to live in a dictatorship if they knew for sure that they'd be part of the ruling class. For the rest...the complexity of the modern world is beyond them and always will be.
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