A postcard from the day after an election
A postcard from the day after an election
Capturing a further political-constitutional moment
Yesterday things were unclear, and today things are all too clear.
Yesterday it looked as if Harris could win. On the evidence available to someone watching from England, there seemed no great enthusiasm for Trump either at his flagging under-attended rallies or elsewhere. There seemed no reason to believe he would do better than four years ago (or two years ago with his endorsed candidates).
But against that view was a sense of apprehension, if not doom. For, as this blog also averred, one could also too easily imagine Trump winning. Not because one could point to ‘factors’ (as a certain type of historian would put it), but just because he could - especially in this age of extreme political volatility.
And he has.
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One trick of the human mind is to place shape and form onto events which at the time were uncertain, and so those who were themselves unclear as to what was about to happen tend to deftly switch to being very clear about what went wrong - and who was to blame.
From the perspective of this liberal constitutionalist blog the only points that seem worth making at this stage is about how the electoral system (at least in the United States but also elsewhere) is inefficient in certain respects.
Viz:
A candidate was a liar, known to be a liar and could easily be shown to be liar - but people voted for that candidate anyway.
A candidate was a convicted fraudster - but people voted for that candidate anyway.
A candidate was by any meaningful definition an insurrectionist - but people voted for that candidate anyway.
And a candidate was in the views of some serious people a fascist - but people voted for that candidate anyway.
This means that there is no point, in and of itself, showing a candidate to be a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist if people do not actually care if that candidate is a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist.
And so if the outputs of a media-political system of accountability - such as that offered by the lengthy US presidential campaign - do not gain purchase or traction, then the question is what is the purpose of a system of accountability.
The view that once a candidate is shown to be [X] then that would be enough for voters to not support that candidate falls apart when voters, knowing the candidate is [X], do not care.
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What is the solution to this problem?
Perhaps there is no solution. As a Victorian politician once said to an earnest colleague: do you really believe there are solutions to political problems?
(One day I will track down that quotation.)
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But a step towards a solution is to understand the nature of the problem.
The old media-political model of accountability - the Woodward and Bernstein model, if you will - is not working when you have a shameless candidate clapped and cheered by nod-along supporters.
And it is not a problem that is going to go away.
Yes, Trump is exceptionally charismatic - it is difficult to image a DeSantis or a Vance carrying a campaign like Trump. As such it is tempting to see him as a one-off and to just wait for him to go and for normality to return.
But there will be other Trumps, especially as the old gatekeepers in political parties and mainstream media fall away, and as illiberals become more adept at exploiting mass social media.
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The one book which seems pertinent to all this originated in (of all years) 1984.
This was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death - a book which should be better known.
His son wrote this brilliant short essay about that book and Trump in 2017, a lot which still stands today.
His son said:
“I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did not. He saw his job as identifying a serious, under-addressed problem, then asking a set of important questions about the problem. He knew it would be hard to find an easy answer to the damages wrought by “technopoly”. It was a systemic problem, one baked as much into our individual psyches as into our culture.”
His son then put forward some possible solutions. You may think of others. I cannot think of any.
How do you have accountability when people care not for the accounts that they are given?
When people know they are being lied to, but do not care?
I have no idea.
The only conclusion I have is that it is time for a good cup of tea.
The accountability model fails when a large part of the appeal of a candidate is that the candidate, and his policies, are essentially transgressive. We have seen in the past couple of weeks new appalling behaviours by the candidate that have served (if one can judge at all) only to deepen his appeal to his base, and also to broaden it. It is surely the case, too, that everybody underestimated the power of familiarity and branding that comes with running for the third time on a more or less pure personality play. Unwillingness to engage with any policy issue on a rational level (a preference for allegations about cats and dogs, in fact) is another clear part of the attraction. How off-putting for this candidate and the electorate to have to engage with a new opponent, whose market penetration would never be more than 100-days deep. And, to boot, a prosy ex-prosecutor with fine ideals but rather shallow arguments. Finally, our man digging up a whole new stratum of rural obscurity (in what used to be known as the boonies) is something that might have been predicted, but certainly couldn't be measured in advance (because those are not people that answer the phone to pollsters or anybody else much).
Once again, you have put the case for the unspoken nuances so delicately and so well. Thank you for articulating what we feel.
Perhaps the real issue is he should have been held accountable immediately after the insurrection, and after each and every action every time. Instead, he was allowed to act with complete impunity. This favour is never granted to any other person. Now the climate chaos will be left to accelerate which will impact every individual on this planet.