DEMOCRACY'S LOSS: AN ELECTION POST MORTEM

 

More than forty-eight percent of Americans who bothered to cast votes in the presidential election last Tuesday are in varying stages of shock, mourning, anger and dismay. And yes, the US remains pretty much a fifty-fifty country in terms of the split between those backing Donald Trump and everyone else. This was clearly a punishment vote against the Biden administration and in keeping with people’s perception (as opposed to the actual fundamentals) of the economy. But it was also, I can’t help thinking, about racism and sexism.

That said, this was obviously no ordinary election between two normal everyday candidates with somewhat different points of view about policy. This was, and remains, the most consequential election since the Civil War, when democracy triumphed over sedition. Unfortunately, the result is just the opposite this time. The candidate placed in charge by the will of the majority is a man who violated the Constitution, sought to subvert a former electoral process and refused to submit to a peaceful transfer of power—for the first time in American history. Obviously, with the backing of a hijacked Republican Party, he is now being rewarded for his consistently bad behavior. And you can bet that these next four years will be even worse than anything we have ever seen from him before. Be advised: It will cost democracy and Americans dearly.

But perhaps democracy isn’t anything the majority cares about any more. This was, unquestionably, a free, fair and democratic election. But the result has placed a repeatedly confessed autocrat in charge. So, maybe this will be the last free and fair election the United States ever has.

Perhaps people just care more about the price of gasoline and eggs than they do their inalienable rights. Maybe they care more about controlling what other people do with their bodies and whom they love than they do about guaranteeing individual rights (everyone else’s, but, in the end, their own as well) and the sanctity of the rule of law. Maybe they care more about their children’s “education” being based on their own subjective “beliefs” than they do about their learning the proven facts and science of how the world and the beings and systems in it function. And almost certainly, it is more important to them to have a white male chauvinist in charge, no matter how morally and ethically flawed he might be, than to embrace the sexual and ethnic diversity that is, whether they like it or not, the United States of America.

That said, each person votes his or her conscience, or, perhaps, better said, his or her immediate to short-term convenience, and that is the general idea behind representative democracy—even when the outcome may well damage democracy beyond repair. What the majority seems to have failed to do in this case is vote with the future of the US as we know it in mind.

A survey run by the Associated Press seems to bear this out. While six in ten of the one hundred twenty thousand people surveyed indicated they were fearful of what Trump might do in a second term with no guardrails, many of them said they were voting for him anyway. Indeed, more than half indicated that, while they were hoping to keep drama to the minimum, they were also bent on seeing substantial change in the way the country was being governed. More telling still,  three out of ten—not coincidentally, I surmise, about the proportion of the population made up of Donald Trump’s most fanatical cult-followers—said they were hoping to see “total upheaval” in the way the country is run.

But from a strictly liberal independent viewpoint, there’s a lot of accountability to go around for Tuesday’s presidential election outcome. And here, I take full responsibility for the theories that I’m about to posit. They are, indeed, mine, and the product of my own critical thoughts and ponderings.

The person least to blame for this election outcome is Kamala Harris. The vice president did an astonishing job, in just one hundred seven days, of galvanizing Democratic support, uniting left and center in the party, raising record funding, exciting the Democratic base, choosing a vice presidential candidate with wide popular appeal, and introducing herself to an American public for whom she was a largely unknown figure. She also went on an incredibly brief and inhumanly extenuating journey of both battleground and other key states in order to carry her message of domestic peace and democracy directly to the people. For any unprejudiced observer, it was hard not to see her performance as nothing short of extraordinary. And hopefully she will not disappear from the leadership of the party once her term in office ends.

The person most to blame for this election outcome is Joe Biden. From the outset, after snatching the primary from a highly competitive Independent, Bernie Sanders, Biden had said that he would be a transitional leader. And yet, he failed to seize propitious opportunities to make it clear that he would be a four-year president. Many in his party insisted that he was “the only Democrat who could beat Trump” (again). In hindsight, that belief on their part was exactly that, “a belief” with no real basis in fact, since, by the midterms, his popularity was already languishing, and by shortly afterward, very real concerns were arising about his physical fitness and his mental acuity.
The mid-terms, or slightly thereafter, would have been the time for him to announce that he wouldn’t stand for another term, thus permitting the party to run a primary race and establish a public consensus for choosing a candidate. I blame both the party and First Lady Jill Biden for pushing him to go for another term when both she and the party leadership couldn’t help but see, early on, what became public knowledge during the president’s absolutely disastrous performance in his only debate with Donald Trump.

But still, even after that, he dragged his feet, hunkered down and refused to go until the party made it clear that he had to, for the good of the movement. To his credit, he resigned the race with patriotism and understanding. But it was too little, way too late.   

The Democratic Party basically threw Kamala Harris to the lions. Democratic leaders sent her on a kamikaze mission, on which, it must be said, she did incredibly well. Indeed, putting aside the perennial vagaries of a controversial Electoral College system, Harris has swept better than forty-eight percent of the popular vote with little left to report. This was true despite the inescapable handicap of being an incumbent VP, who had to try to convince people that she was her own woman without challenging the authority of her boss or disavowing any of his policies. A VP with the character of a Donald Trump would have thrown the president under the bus during such a campaign. It speaks very highly of her ethics and respect for the office of the presidency that she refused to do that. But apparently, in today’s world, ethics are a liability that costs one dearly.

Women and minorities must live with the fact that they voted against their best interests. Or didn’t vote at all. Democrats and, in particular, Joe Biden, have generally done well with African American voters. In Biden’s case, this is not only because of his career-long work in the field of civil rights and justice, but also because he was vice president to the country’s first black president—and one of its most popular presidents in US history. Black voters were a big help to Biden in defeating Trump in 2020.

But that trend didn’t carry over to this race. At least not with men. Despite the fact that Kamala Harris would have been the second black and first woman president of the United States, Trump managed to double his support among African Americans this time around. It appears that this was due, almost entirely, to young African American males trending toward the so-called “bromance”—men’s preference for a flawed old white guy over a woman, and especially a black woman—that the Trump campaign enjoyed.

In other words, a large contingent of black, and especially young black,  men preferred to vote for an aging white man with questionable mental acuity, and with provable ties to and sentiments toward white nationalist and white supremacist groups than to vote for a dynamic woman of color of a younger generation who clearly had their best interests, their history, and their struggles in mind. I can only conjecture that this is a question of sexism, the choosing of a male, even against their better interests, over an empathic female. Perhaps many of these black male voters (along with their fellow white bromance voters) cast their ballots in a conscious effort to ensure that women, their women, were not further empowered or inspired to greater militancy in favor of women’s causes. Perhaps the Handmaid’s Tale nature of Trumpian politics and its goal of very apparently disenfranchising women seemed appealing to them. Indeed, they may well have liked the idea of “protecting” women “whether they like it or not.”

But they weren’t the only ones  voting against their better interests. Trump made significant gains as well among Hispanic voters. Part of that was, of course, based on fears fueled by the Trump campaign of a sharp swing toward the left. A segment of Latino voters, made up of the Hispanic diaspora from so-called “socialist” countries such as Cuba or Venezuela are vulnerable to buzzwords like “socialist”, “communist”, “leftist”, etc. That’s understandable. Their families suffered hunger, penury, prison and torture in countries claiming to be socialist.

It is very hard—believe me, I’ve tried—to get people from those origins to focus on the success of liberal politics throughout the West. Theirs is a kneejerk reaction that knows no middle of the road. Left is bad. Right is good. They often fail to understand, for obvious reasons, that the Castros, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro were never socialists. They were always totalitarians, dictators, despots who wrapped themselves in a red flag, in the same way that other former Latin American strongmen like Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla wrapped themselves in the flag of capitalism and Western Christianity. So those folks are pretty much always a lost cause for Democrats.

But this time, Harris bled votes among other Hispanic populations as well. And particularly among Hispanic males. Why did so many Latinos break with the Democrats? A number of pundits seem bent on trying to convince us that, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But having my own hands-on half-century of insight into Latin America, I think it’s more than that. The economy may be a factor, or at least an excuse. But I can’t help thinking that much of the shift came when it became clear that the Democratic candidate would be a woman. In other words, never underestimate the power of machismo among Latin males.

Meanwhile, the “macho man” to whom they lent their support is the same one who has referred repeatedly to Latin Americans pejoratively—with the latest offense being a reference from his campaign (which he failed to chastise) to Puerto Rico as a “a floating island of garbage”. But this was nothing new. Trump has long generally referred to Mexican migrants as “rapists, criminals and drug traffickers”, and to Hispanic migrants in general as coming from “shithole countries”, and as “poisoning the blood of our nation.”

Under his first administration, Hispanic migrant families were separated at the border, children were caged and later put into foster care in far-flung regions of the US. Significant numbers of those children were simply lost by the administration, and even after being deported, it took some of their desperate parents months to be reunited with those kids.

Now, one of Trump’s major campaign promises is that “from Day One” he will mount the “largest deportation operation in the history of the United States.” The president-elect has vowed that he will deport a million people—the great majority Hispanics. Experts say that to reach that massive number, the next Trump administration will necessarily have to go after people for whom Kamala Harris supported providing a path to citizenship. That is to say, people who have long been established in the Unites States and have been making a useful contribution to American society. Among others, this would include the so-called “Dreamers”—people brought to the US by their migrant parents when they were still infants or children, and who have basically spent their entire lives in American society, but who never had American citizenship or visas.

What a critical mass of Latinos for Trump have voted for, then, are situations in which members of their communities, their friends, their relatives, will face the tragedy of deportation, no matter how long they have lived, worked and thrived in American society. Their votes have given Trump a weapon that he will turn on people they know, people with whom they share cultural and ethnic ties, even people they love.

They share this dubious distinction with a segment of the Muslim community that could think of no better way to protest the admitted lack of decision by the Biden administration in taking Israel to serious task for its genocidal military operations in Gaza. In other words, Muslims who “punished” Harris—who had made it clear that her administration would take a new tack regarding the Israeli-Palestinian war, and that she would push for a two-state solution—did so by helping elect Israeli leader Bibi Netanyahu’s closest American ally, and a man who initiated his former administration, in 2016, by declaring “a complete and total ban” on Muslim immigration to the US. A ban that remained in place until Democrats sued, taking the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was finally shot down.

But none of these other betrayals can hold a candle to the one Kamala Harris suffered at the hands of voters of her own gender, both the ones who voted for Trump and the ones who stayed home. The potential for a second term for Donald Trump should have been, just out of sheer self-respect, a clarion call to every gender-conscious woman to make sure that never happened. But that only emerged among African American women, who traditionally vote Democrat as a majority, but who this time came out in force and voted eighty-five percent for Kamala Harris.

Latinas, meanwhile, let her down. Although Harris still got a traditional Democratic majority of Hispanic women’s votes, she did so by about five percentage points fewer than Joe Biden did in 2020. In such a consequential election for women’s rights and Latin American migrant families, this outcome can only be seen as illogical and counterintuitive. Did that sliver of Latinas simply join their male partners in defecting to Trump? It seems likely, but we’ll never know.

White women are quite often split fifty-fifty in American elections between Republicans and Democrats. But again, this was no common everyday election. This was an election that would have given women their first president in history. Nor was that the only consideration. The female candidate in question is a campaigner for women’s rights, an advocate for the reproductive rights of which women have already been stripped by Trump, who has repeatedly bragged about doing so. More shocking still, Trump improved his election performance this time around young white women, the ones with the most to lose in the future from an administration bent on sending women back to the dark ages of nineteen-fifties American sexism. 

Blame must also be laid at the door of women who, at least in such a consequential election for their own interests, simply didn’t get off their couch and go vote. In what is a decidedly apathetic electorate, in which a sixty-six percent turnout is considered “a great success”, if non-voting women were ever going to vote, this should have been the year.

Well, in this election, roughly ninety-nine million potential voters just couldn’t be bothered—even when absentee and mail-in voting makes it possible to cast a ballot from the comfort of one’s own home. Of those, it’s safe to say that roughly half were women. And, logically, half of those were very likely liberal-leaning, if not potential Democrats. That means there were probably well more than twenty million Democratic women’s votes that were withheld. Even a fraction of those would have provided for the razor-close race the US was supposed to have had. Half might well have handed Kamala Harris a resounding victory despite the Electoral College. But those women simply could not be bothered to do their part.

As a candidate, Kamala Harris was a woman who was challenging a former president who has proven repeatedly to be a misogynist. A man for whom women are broken down into body parts, a man who once said,  “You know, it doesn't really matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”  A father who, in a public interview with controversial radio personality Howard Stern, said it was okay for Stern to refer to the former president's own daughter Ivanka as  “a piece of ass” and discussed with Stern whether or not Ivanka had had breast implants (“I would know,” he said).  A man who also said of Ivanka that he would “probably be dating her” if he weren’t her father.   

 

This is a man who has demeaned and insulted women in every way possible, a court-certified sexual predator. One who had to pay millions of dollars in damages to a woman he sexually assaulted and later libeled, one who paid a hundred thirty thousand dollars to a porn star so she wouldn’t talk about their one-night stand, and, in the process of doing so, committed thirty-four felonies. The same guy who said, of young women in beauty pageants that he sponsored, that he could do whatever he wanted to them, even “grab them by the pussy,” because “he was a star.”

But these haven’t been the only occasions on which he has shown his contempt for women. Among other things, he has said:

-         “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America.”

-         To a female contestant on his show, Celebrity Apprentice, three years before he took office,  “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

-         Of himself, "All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me — consciously or unconsciously.”

-         Of then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly when she was a debate moderator and took him to task, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

-         Of his 2015 Republican primary rival Carly Fiorina, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

-         And once again, to shock-jock Howard Stern, “A person who’s flat-chested is very hard to be 'a ten', OK?”

This is the man who packed the Supreme Court with radical right-wing justices strategically placed there to overturn a half-century-old legal precedent that gave women control over their own bodies and their reproduction rights, and got the government out of their bedrooms and marriages. A man whose own wife regularly refuses to appear in public with him. This is the man women voted for over a female candidate with nothing but empathy for their struggle and their causes, one who had promised to fight for them against a far-right plan (Project 2025) to introduce a process that defies the bounds of dystopian fiction.

All I can say is, congratulations! If Trumpian women’s goal was to place their own basic interests directly in harm’s way, you couldn’t have chosen better.