The dueling narratives that follow American elections are out there in force this morning, as usual untethered from much of anything besides intuition, usually derived from the narrative-crafter’s own feelings or the expressed feelings of people they know best.
Which is fine: what passes for solid evidence in discerning voter motivation is usually woefully simplistic about the connection between experience, cognition, and concrete action anyway. Almost nobody reading the tea leaves of electoral politics does better than random in forecasting where this is all going.
I voted dutifully yesterday, but glumly, having watched a Democratic candidate for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court get hammered by baseless, stupid but traditionally competent Republican ads without anything like an effective response—yielding the unsurprising result of adding another Republican to what thankfully remains a Democratic-majority court.
So my own simple intuition is this. Democrats and the surburban independents who joined them in voting for Biden in November 2020 wanted to feel done by November 2021 with two things: Trump and the pandemic. If by November 2021 they also felt like there were substantive changes that were really tangible and visible on other issues, I’m sure that also would have been welcome, but I think that wouldn’t matter so much if national politics had been fumigated to the maximum degree possible and competent management of the pandemic had put it behind us for the most part except in pockets of the most defiantly misrun states in the country.
But neither has been true. Everyone got about six months of relative peace and quiet on the Trump front from about February to June, and then it became clear that the Democrats really had no intention of scouring the government clean of his influence. Garland has made it plain that his policy on the last four years is to see no evil, hear no evil, and investigate no evil. Some executive orders got overturned early and then that activity largely stopped. All the eggs on voting rights were put in one legislative basket which was then left on the doorstep of Joe Manchin, who had no intention of taking them inside to hatch. It doesn’t feel to me like state-level Democratic organizations, with a few exceptions, are gearing up to counter what the GOP is clearly planning for 2024 in terms of subverting elections. The feeling of dread is returning for a lot of us, and along with it, maybe, a sense of resignation and despair.
What’s intensifying that is that it turns out that a more professional, clear-headed approach to managing the pandemic isn’t enough to manage the pandemic, and that’s not just because of the way it got politicized in the US under Trump. Everywhere in the world, even in the best-managed countries, the pandemic’s end has been messy and complicated. And in the US, the politicization swings both ways: not only are anti-vaxxers remaining stubbornly attached to their misinformation streams (even as they die or suffer as a result) precisely because that attachment has come to signify political and social loyalty, to some extent, we the virtuously vaccinated have become overly attached to the the expressive power of compliance, looking over every gathering or meeting or activity for signs of slightly imperfect adherence to even the vaguest or least evidence-based guidance from the CDC or other public health agencies.
So here we are feeling that the only thing that’s changed is that Trump isn’t on Twitter or Facebook—which is letting people like Glenn Youngkin run a more traditionally managed GOP campaign full of appeals to fear and paranoia but without Trump dropping payloads of raw chaos into the news cycle every single day and screwing up the strategy. With Democrats also running their traditionally meek and managerial campaigns in response. And here we are in the middle of the unresolved chaos of the pandemic, with most of the day-to-day management of it still contracted out to workplaces and localities and without any evidence that public health agencies have learned any kind of cultural or political savvy since February 2020.
I don’t think the Democrats had to deliver infrastructure and police reform and comprehensive climate action and child care and Supreme Court reform and everything else transformative and good in a single year. But they at least needed to appear to both urgently and intensely share the animating feelings of their coalition and to deliver some sense of closure and security about the two major things that brought that coalition together. I don’t have any sense of either myself, and I would suggest that many Democrats nationwide feel the same.
Image credit: Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash