How to Understand the Election Results

And why you should be happy with them, no matter your political persuasion

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about college students reacting to the election, which has made me think about my own college days, which coincided with the 2008 presidential election. This was a pretty happy time for me. No one I knew was terribly interested in electoral politics. A lot of people I knew were terribly interested in Donald Barthelme and Eric Rohmer. I was living in Hyde Park, Chicago, about eight blocks from Obama family hearth when Barack won the presidency. Pretty much the epicenter of Obamamania. (The house itself was blocked of by barricades and guarded 24/7, but members of a nearby synagogue were allowed to pass through on their way to Temple, and perhaps get an extra-strong whiff of Hope We Could Believe In.) And even then I didn’t feel that it was very important to take a strong interest in electoral affairs—nor did I feel it was important where I was, or where I was perceived to be, on the left-right political spectrum. I remember a university friend who suspected me of holding strange views and who approached me to tell me (in retrospect, this was—I am being earnest here—an act of kindness and grace almost unthinkable today) that it was OK if I was voting for McCain; it wouldn’t affect our friendship at all. (I told her I didn’t plan to vote, didn’t.)

It is old hat by now to note that this all changed with Trump in 2016. My milieu became politicized in a way that I could never have truly predicted back then, and I know this was not just my own experience. A common refrain among those who would defend this politicization is to say that ‘things were always political, it’s just that we’re noticing it now.’ This is a half-truth—the worst kind of truth.

What’s true about such a statement? It’s true that everything in the world is political in potentia. Absolutely any issue can be politicized. If I hand you a stick of gum, we can dissect the political implications of this action. How did it come to be that I had the stick of gum to give in the first place? Why am I giving you the stick of gum, and not someone more deserving? What are the ethical practices of the company that produces the gum? Do they pay their workers fair wages? Are they green? Do they use animal-derived gelatin? 

The paragraph above is parodic, but only slightly. From 2016 to 2020, this was approximately the level of the discourse that rose to the top in media circles. This standard was applied neurotically to anything that might be considered for publication—whether the putative subject was literature, science, or home gardening. Of course, this hermeneutic was not born in 2016. One might even say that it is the mode of thought that his been dominant in the West at least since the Enlightenment itself. At the very least, we can say that it is precisely this mode of thinking that produced the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Lib, and other touchstones of a half-century of progressive history which have been burnt into our nation’s consciousness. This is what made it so difficult to argue against for anyone who remained within the Enlightenment paradigm. You wouldn’t say that Martin Luther King was too political, would you? You wouldn’t say that about the suffragettes.

But why did it appear to spike so dramatically with Trump? From the 1970s to 2016 the political machine had reached something like a consensus in the United States. Political parties still fought with one another, but there was very little difference between the two of them. This was the age of the End of History. Both the Clintons and the Bushes agreed that it was necessary to bomb foreign countries in order to promote democracy, and everyone from Jimmy Carter to the Koch brothers agreed—whether tacitly or explicitly—that both legal and illegal immigration into the United States should increase to the degree shown in this chart.

Trump was the first candidate in our modern era—which we can mark by the breaking of the Bretton Woods agreement and the end the Gold Standard in 1971—to diverge enough from consensus to engender a passionate reaction from the establishment media that had been propping up the kayfabe war between the Democratic and Republican party. This is why, in 2016, “everything became political.” It was not enough to be neutral in this landscape. In the first time in my lifetime, one really did need to pledge allegiance—to the two-party establishment—in order to make it.

But the same phenomenon which brought Trump into power in the first place also made this unifying anti-Trumpism untenable. The way the internet facilitated the spread of information outside of the mainstream media outlets not only allowed Trump in through the back door, it also rendered untenable the sort of consensus-building that had been a regime mainstay for over 50 years. It was no longer possible to convince the country as a whole that Trump and Trumpism were uniquely evil; in fact, it was no longer possible to convince the country as a whole of anything at all.

And yet—and here is where I am able to provide extremely good news to people whether they are left, right, or center—none of this matters much. For now, at least. Let me explain why, and why you should be happy with these election results no matter your political affiliation.