Election clean-up

There is no blame, only consequences, and then teaching moments.

We’re wading in the muddy chaos stage of the still prez-elect administration, and Trump is up to his usual shtick: thumbing his nose at everyone, attracting attention by play-acting the crazy man for the media thirsting for his political pornography,  and getting ready to make a mint with his usual transactions, or scams, depending on whether the buyer is a foreign government or a patsy-citizen. Meanwhile, the Democrats are scouring the moral universe for scapegoats. Well, there is a herd of them, but one seems particularly irksome and complex: The impact of identity politics and what we have to call for the sake of brevity: “wokeness.”

In brief

Trump won the election because both his strategy, as crazy as it seemed, and his tactics, were simply better in the current moment. Like any good snake-oil salesman, he read the room well, and he plied the audience with both the problem and the solution, plus a lot of entertainment and a lot of flattery. He spoke about “you,” and we.” Very shrewd, because in the blizzard of incomprehensible nonsense and stream-of-consciousness hallucinations, those two words stick out like richly baited hooks.

I will not pretend to know for sure or give a single answer as to why Kamala Harris lost the election. Price of eggs? Well, if the legacy media instead of waxing vociferous over Trump’s shenanigans would have explained that there is a bird flu ravaging herds of chickens and that meant supply was low, demand remained high, maybe people would have understood… I could write a book, but I have a rent to pay.

Some reasons were just the circumstantial . She went into the race quickly, without a primary, and that smelled a little of coup d’état. She did not represent “change,” say the pundits left and right, which begs the corollary: The media treated her as a “normal” candidate, no boat-rocking expected or demanded, it would be too risky. She had to explain whatever policy she was offering for an electorate that can’t stand long explanations (John Kerry effect). She had to “do interviews” with the right people, raise money, develop a great ground game, above all, be positive. She had to stick to the “norms,” unwritten laws that the GOP doesn’t care about.

So, she started off well with the “joy” motto, shelf life meh. She wanted to provide a counterweight to the ranting monster and his “fuck your feelings” flock on the other side of the board. And all the right celebrities came to back her, all considered “elites” by the other side, I should add. She ran a consciously inclusive campaign, a sort of 21^st-century Norman Rockwell show.

Less tea, more coffee

Joy and democracy and the shaky-but-recovering economy are not really quotidian issues. They lack concreteness. We laughed about Trump and his eggs and bacon but failed to see the effectiveness. I watched social media, especially X… The MAGA crowd was lapping it up. She did focus on women’s health, but, here too, as we found out, the issue of abortion did not score very high, and the reason is perhaps more complicated than a meme, and yet it is telling of the state of the USA. It has to do with morality, strangely, but I will get to that at some other time.

Jan 6 and the threat of fascism? Yeah, the one happened four years ago, so might as well say it happened in, let’s say, 1832. The second falls on ears that have been well groomed at hearing -isms without really knowing what they mean. Even historians disagree on what is fascism. (I wrote three Stacks on this, including this one: https://mradkai.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/149841792?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts, but, you know Brandolini’s Law, one word, but long explanations no one has time to read and at least consider).

For me, observing the right wing media bubble and social media (mostly X), identity was indeed a key neural point in the defeat of the Democrats. The impact was on many levels, and it gave the  Republican candidates myriad  ways to attack the Democrats.  It’s also what prevented Harris from ripping her shirt off and snarling like a wounded sea lion. Once the whoops of joy had died down, she became restrained. She couldn’t, wouldn’t say what she would change. In fact, she was performing a grand split, on the one hand, and a perilous rhetorical regatta in a reef-infested waters on the other.

The big unspoken

If you don’t address the “cultural” elephant in the room, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. The elephant is actually a synesthesia of “woke” themes, from transgender rights, DEI, nefarious white privilege, Palestine and the war there, and many more. BTW: Nothing wrong with having issues… But elections are about the look.

I’ll note comedians Jon Stewart and John Oliver, or Brian Taylor Cohen, all very sharp people, refusing to admit that this was a problem. They say that  Harris never mentioned most of these issues. It was precisely the conscious omission of that elephant in her speeches, the trans-thingie, for example, that made it noticeable. Because had anyone in the Democratic party been checking the MAGA noise machines these past years, they would have noticed that it was very present there. That is why the Trump campaign spent a fortune on the now notorious “she/her/you” ad campaign and the issue of trans-surgery for prisoners.

That ad cleverly distilled the very active, noisy, youthfully boisterous issues promulgated by the  Wokesphere that makes up a small but visible segment of the potential Democratic electorate. Members are cantankerous and noisy, often demanding to be agreed with 100%, or else, entitled, sometimes funny, dismissive, disrespectful, insulting, often arrogant, smart-alecky, and like everyone not always the deepest thinkers. And they have become a real gift to the GOP as a weapon against the perceived elitism of the left and a cultural issue among people who feel abandoned, nay, humiliated, by the Democrats, who want to be not only politically correct, but morally correct as well.

Loud background music

The trans issue epitomized the problem, hence that ad… Whether Harris distanced herself from her surgery for prisoners comment or not is irrelevant. Fact is, the GOP kept the whole notion alive, because nothing riled up the Democrats’ woke base more than that. I noted many liberal, centrist people being descended upon by mobs of “transactivists” for just questioning the affirmative care model. These hooligans pretended to be somehow literate, but would quickly and violently accuse anyone questioning the transgender orthodoxy as a Nazi, a transphobe, a murderer, a TERF, and many other names, and any reasonable exchange of ideas becomes quite impossible. I have collected some of the memes, and they are violent, and pre-Musk Twitter did not even take those down.

In the process, the activists, who were definitely in the Democrat camp, alienated many who would otherwise have been powerful allies for the Democrats. Among others, feminists, notably of the Gen X group, including people like J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, or Kathleen Stock, professor of philosophy (lesbian and outspoken feminist). Stock, who authored Material Girls as a refutation of Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles (which is sort of the Bif the transgender crowd) had to quit her job at the University of Sussex. People in England questioning the practices of the Tavistock Centre, which has since closed, were set upon by more mobs… In my city, Geneva, scientists and experts presenting alternative views on the treatment of teens suffering from dysphoria at the university (in 2022) were assaulted by small gangs of activists, and the institution, in panic, declined even to press charges.

These incidents were fairly rare, say the so-called left, if mentioning them at all, but they were very visible, and that is the point I am making.  The Trump campaign understood how potent imagery can be, especially in today’s media landscape. And the Dems, criminally, have forgotten Reagan’s Welfare Queen and GHW Bush’s Willie Horton ad. These are glowing examples of how to get the oppo on its back foot during an election! So the GOP went to work, and, TO my horror, I saw it unfold…The message was clear: The Dems will go to bat for a few people with an identity problem, I will go to bat for you on economic issues. Wow: simple and effective. Whatever follows is irrelevant.

To achieve their aim was easy. All GOP operatives had to do was scour Tik-Tok for young girls or boys with multicolored hair whining about being misgendered, or guys with beards saying they have their period, or teens horribly scarred from mastectomies. Or drag queens telling stories to little kids: It might be ok for some, but unfortunately, it really does look cringey, and worse, it doesn’t play in Peoria, as we’ve seen.

Million words vs. a few images

The powerful and evocative image of a tall, muscular man with junk visible in his swimming trunks, insisting he was a woman and smiling because he had won a swimming competition against girls was quite devastating as well. And let me mention law professor Khiara Bridges engaging in an exchange with Josh Hawley of all people in which she snootily referred to women as “people capable of pregnancy”, of cis-women, non-binary people, in short, typical academic jargon meant to overwhelm and humiliate the less educated. Bridges, for all her smarts, got tricked by Hawley, a fellow I cannot stand. She came off sounding like an arrogant, self-aggrandizing, self-righteous… professor. And her snootiness washed off on the Democrats. It was palpable. Should I mention Matt Walsh’s film “What Is a Woman?”

All the while, the activist Wokesphere, acting as an ad-hoc police force, failed to see that they were alienating classic liberals and even members of the LGB community who were not so happy with the idea of men becoming women and vice-versa. Feminists concerns for safe spaces (locker rooms, women’s prisons) were dismissed out of hand. Anyone suggesting deeper scientific research to understand the phenomenon was immediately charged with being a fascist or a Nazi, or a suicide enabler. Research into the rapid proliferation of gender dysphoria among young people due, perhaps, to the impact of social media was swept aside (cf. Lisa Littman and the issue of RODG). And anyone detransitioning (and some were quite vocal about it) was also sent to the verbal woodshed. Increasingly, the trans-activists, many of whom were not trans, were acting like the militia of a cult. And the look was really bad.

Alas, the Democratic Party tolerated the Wokesphere – which I myself thought was not really a thing until evidence became too strong– I suspect to avoid losing the youth vote. It was not about “milk of human kindness,” and “love of minorities.” It was a political calculation. And that is what many Latinos and Latinas, African Americans and others always suspect about the Party: “You need us during election season, and after that, we’re just furniture.” This is also a message the GOP has embraced…And so, strangely, the current GOP has become the big tent the Dems used to be, a big tent in which everyone can let everything hang out.

Talking turkey

Among the first to note the power of identity as a wedge issue after the election was Anthony Scaramucci, as far as I know. Shortly after the results came in, he said about the Trump electorate:

“They all vote against their economic interest to win that culture war.”

On CNN later that day, Wednesday Nov 6, Julie Roginsky – Democratic strategist and an activist for women’s issues – noted the nefarious impact of the language police on CNN:

“We are not the party of common sense, which is the message that voters sent to us. (…) When we address Latino voters as Latin-X, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think we don’t even live on the same planet. (…) And (…) when we put pronouns after names and say ‘she her’, as opposed to saying, ‘you know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out. I'm sorry, I won't do it again. But stop with the virtue signaling and just speak to people like they're normal.”*

Roginsky expanded on her Substack posting, warning people not to forget her generation, Gen X, which, she suggests, is in fact sick and tired of being told what to do and say.

What Generation X hates more than anything is a scold. We have been conditioned to tune out the nagging from birth. And Democrats have often come across as scolds, to anyone who said that the economy was not working for them, to anyone who mistakenly used the wrong terminology, to anyone who felt he or she had to walk on egg shells in order not to get canceled. As Rahm Emanuel, another Gen-Xer, said in The NY Times, “When the woke police come at you, you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

People like Roginsky deserve to be heeded. While gender issues were by far not the sole stumbling block for the Democrats and Harris, it did hamper the candidate, who was forced to manage the coalition with kid gloves.  Before the ’22 midterms, I even mentioned that this could sink the Democrats. I was two years early.

Assigning blame is counterproductive. But there are consequences when you lose sight of the larger picture. The Democrats have to redesign their message to once again become the big tent that includes blue-collar America. They have to go back to the basics and learn again to speak to all Americans, which is getting more and more difficult, but not impossible. Yes, I have my axe to grind with the pretty unsavory violence and “fuck your feelings” attitude the MAGA crowds display, their incredible gullibility and their irresponsibility. But it’s time to roll up sleeves and do what Pete Buttigieg does, enter the media belly of the beast and fight.

Finally:  As someone who has taught teenagers, I love the unfiltered quality of young people, especially when they are rebellious. As teenagers, we always think we are right about everything we feel and that we know it all. It’s only slowly that we realize that what we thought was a feeling, is actually just disorganized thoughts. I, too, was a teenager once, and I haven’t forgotten the feeling…  I did listen to my elders, even as I was ready to tear the planet apart.  I learned a lot from older people, the great teachers I had, the serendipitous meeting with a former World-War-Two soldier, a widow in a train, a Russian refugee… They all gifted me their experience and their knowledge. Young recruits fight best next to veteran soldiers (the Battle of Valmy is an example). Old  martial artists don’t move much, but when they do, their move is perfect… like the cook Ding in the Zhuangzi. Let us learn to overcome this scourge that is destroying democracy.

*The whole clip is here: