Unfortunately, my prediction of a Trump victory was correct.
I can’t predict what a Trump administration will do. Neither can Donald Trump.
But I can say there will be a price to pay. The form it will take is not predictable. Maybe, as in the first years of his first administration, the economy will improve. But the long-term consequences of an anti-conceptual, xenophobic, conspiracy-spinning president will overwhelm any short-term material gains.
But, surprisingly, the reasons he won contain some positives.
This election was a huge setback for racist politics—i.e., what’s called “identity politics.” A higher-than-expected percentage of blacks voted against a black candidate, a higher-than-expected percentage of women voted against a woman. It’s too early (5:00 am Nov. 6) to have solid numbers, but 2 days ago, PBS said:
The vice president’s lead among women shrunk from 18 points to 11 points since last month.
When Barack Obama ran the first time, a huge issue was his race. When Hillary Clinton ran, a huge issue was her gender. This time, we didn’t hear much from pundits about Harris’ race or gender, and the voters cared significantly less about those collective labels.
Imagine an election between a woman who was anti-abortion and a man defending the right to abortion; the female vote probably would be for the man. So, gender’s role in this election, diminished as it was, is probably due to the fact that women face the abortion issue in a more urgent, immediate, and personal way than men do.
Likewise, Trump got something like 15% of black voters, up from 4% a few elections ago. And on Fox News, a black man who described himself as a conservative said that black conservatives are no longer shunned in “the black community.”
Trump greatly increased the Republican Latino vote.
It’s an issue of degree, but Americans are becoming less inclined to vote on the basis of race, gender, or country of origin than they were 10 or 20 years ago.
Also, here in Florida, I talk regularly with many MAGA people, and they are motivated more by a rejection of the Left than by xenophobia and racism (which are usually present, beneath the surface). They are Trumpians based on sense-of-life. Despite some ugly elements, the motivating factor of the MAGA people is the “American sense-of-life” that Ayn Rand described and lauded in “Don’t Let It Go” (1971), reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It.
More prescient than ever is Ayn Rand’s warning in that article:
An adolescent can ride on his sense of life for a while. But by the time he grows up, he must translate it into conceptual knowledge and conscious convictions, or he will be in deep trouble. A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it.
Exit polls show that the top or near-top issue for voters was “democracy.” For anti-Trump voters, that meant January 6th. January 6th has also been the basic issue for me and most HBLers. For pro-Trump voters, the same term, “democracy,” covered wanting to stop the Democratic Party’s projected attempts to unravel the system of checks and balances (by packing the Supreme Court, ending the super-majority required to end a filibuster, etc.).
But does the Trumpers’ concern about “democracy” mean a desire to protect the Constitution or simply a partisan desire to rein in the other party?
The package-dealing nature of the term “democracy” wipes out that crucial distinction. Being concerned about “democracy” covers such disparate things as wanting to uphold the rule of law against mob action (January 6) and fearing giving electoral college votes to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. (If there were an American protectorate that was as highly Republican as D.C. is Democratic, Republicans would advocate giving it electoral college votes.) Using “democracy” for this mélange puts the subconscious to sleep. The mental engine seizes up.
The deciding factor is some elections, usually local ones, is the desire for loot. The deciding factor in some, as, perhaps, in Mitt Romney’s defeat, is envy. The racism of “identity politics” may well have been what propelled Barack Obama into office.
If some such degenerate motivation is behind Trump’s re-election, it is the xenophobia of anti-immigration. But I think the bigger factor was a patriotic rebellion against “wokeness.”
But negating one negative won’t protect us from the others.
