Thoughts on the Election
“It’s the environment, stupid”
Not certain how much I have to add but having avoided most analysis, a few of my thoughts:
1—
This result basically comports with my overall sense of things. I simply could not see Trumpism going away—in part because there have been innumerable attempts to banish it over the past decade, which have all fundamentally failed, in part because it has fully made over politics in this country in its image. Democrats basically ran at large as a mirror to Trump, in large part because that’s where the economic/social/environmental trend lines were inevitably heading. More on that below. So despite Harris seeming to have *some* momentum over the past week or two this felt overshadowed by the story of the last decade, and certainly reminiscent of 2016 (and similar moments from the past several years). Obviously it was a kind of magical thinking to believe it would turn out differently.
2—
The Democrats are in large part to blame for this. They ran an extraordinarily feckless and pathetic campaign that by no metric met the stakes they claimed for this election. This includes Biden, who was the nominee until only a couple months ago despite being obviously incapacitated for years and fundamentally a relic of another era, who only stepped aside after being aggressively forced to do so. But let’s be fair to Harris, who was uniquely awful as a candidate and whose terrible campaign shouldn’t be let off the hook. On the most essential level Harris seemed basically devoid of any belief system, in a way even Hillary Clinton wasn’t (I’d argue Clinton did have a guiding ideology, even if it was unpalatable to much of the electorate and she tried poorly to hide it). It’s not clear Harris does. In her only competitive national race before this she flailed and burned out almost immediately. Apart from occasional soundbites she seemed incapable of taking a substantive position and that doomed her, and seems to be at least part of the reason for the ridiculous campaign in which her primary asset was not being Biden, a historically unpopular president—and yet when asked what she would do differently than him she replied, effectively, “Nothing.”
A corollary to this should be the recognition that Democrats will not respond to this loss in any positive or creative way. I was naive enough to think they would in 2016 after the “establishment wing” of the party was so thoroughly repudiated. Turns out they only have an establishment wing. They’ve spent the years since rhetorically co-opting (and then dropping) a few token policies in the Bernie/populist spirit but failing to address any of the significant structural problems his candidacy (and to some degree Trump’s) was based on. By 2024 they’d solidified themselves well to the right of where they were in 2016. Some people now presume there will be a reckoning with that, not least over their unqualified support for Israel. But I doubt there will be. I’m sure some intra-party fights may occur but on that issue specifically 1) I am skeptical the massive outpouring of support for Palestine will invest itself in a party that was committed to nothing so much as suppressing it, and whose president enthusiastically backed the Israeli assault for the last year, and 2) that particular commitment is simply too strong for the party to drop.
They repeatedly learn all the wrong lessons not only because they’re stupid and corrupt (they are) but because to do so is easier. Campaigning with Liz Cheney (daughter of perhaps the most unliked man in the country) for nonexistent suburban votes is low-hanging fruit; they don’t have to change a thing to do it, and in fact can promise even less. They will undoubtedly continue down this road despite it being clear that you can’t run to Trump’s right (setting aside the morality of trying to) as he too fully embodies that space. They’ll continue being a sort of shadow to him and quite possibly transform into the sort of formerly institutional opposition party you now see in authoritarian states around the world, like the Indian National Congress, that occasionally wins some election and maintains a loose facade of competitiveness but cannot seriously challenge power. Or maybe it’ll be worse.
Also: none of this is to dismiss the misogyny of the right, which was obviously integral to this election’s outcome, as it was in 2016. That doesn’t absolve bad Democratic candidates or policies, but it is worth emphasizing.
3—
We must consider the role of the environment in what’s happened. At first glance it would seem to have played no role. Look at exit polls of what voters are concerned about. Climate change and environmental issues are not mentioned (disturbing, to say the least). But that’s not really what I mean. I mean this thesis I’ve tried to express here, namely that ecology—and the ongoing breakdown of the natural world, and its inevitable implications—is literally behind everything, our politics, economics, social dynamics, and so on, in tangible ways. Liberalism is simply not equipped to deal with this breakdown; the problem is material , a fundamentally unsustainable arrangement. Rhetoric, appeals to democracy, can’t do the trick.
Here’s one way to put it. There are quite a few people—this might be the majority view in fact—who believe that if a few things had changed, things would be different. If Comey hadn’t written that letter, if Harris had come out for an arms embargo, whatever. While there is probably some truth to the idea that Republicans scraped through to power on a generally unpopular platform, taking the long view something more insidious is happening.
I reference this essay too much and probably have here but I frequently come back to “Europe Alone—Only Europe” by the late French philosopher Bruno Latour, written around 2017. In it Latour essentially argues (among much else—read it in full, it’s brief) that what we call neoliberalism was not simply a series of political and economic choices but a response by the powers that be to an environment that was being sucked dry. He writes: “I begin with the simple idea that climate change and its denial have been organizing all of contemporary politics at least for the last three decades. Climate change plays the same role that social questions and the class struggle played over the two preceding centuries.”
Latour argues elites recognized the catastrophe of the environmental situation and acted accordingly, promoting a mass program of climate denial while entrenching themselves and deregulating economies to get as much of the dwindling pie as they could. He sees the reactionary populist wave that took off in the last decade as a reaction to that, and he advocates or expresses the hope of sort of transmuting its sentiment into a grounded, healthy, return-to-the-land ethos, based in survival and solidarity and ecological sustainability—rather than the form it’s taken, which is grievance weaponized by the powerful.
At least that’s how I interpret it. The idea made a strong impression. Unfortunately we have not seen any kind of mass healthy ecology develop in the reaction to neoliberalism. The best we get, en masse at least, is things like the Green New Deal, policies that are structurally unequipped to protect us or the environment, and in fact worsen many of the problems through growth and development. So the reaction to neoliberalism has fundamentally taken the form solely of that weaponized grievance.
A truly alternative politics must reckon with the fact that we are collectively living environmental breakdown, and we all know it, including the “deniers.” They’ve simply suppressed, deflected, and displaced this understanding. Why else would we have these ridiculous arguments with climate deniers—as anyone who knows one of these people has—about things like the weather, about whether that last hurricane was unusually strong, if it wasn’t weird how warm it got on Halloween, all these things? We all know it, but for them, the death of the dream is to be turned into a weapon with which they can abuse the less fortunate—migrants, for example.
Seems this is where we’re at. Today was another extraordinarily hot day in the Northeast, close to 80° on November 6—I believe now officially setting records across the region, in many places breaking numbers set in 2022. Much of New England remains under red flag advisories. This is what things look like today.