Wednesday, November 6, 2024

The 2024 Election


After the election of 2024, I found myself searching for understanding why the election went the way it did and how to process it and move forward.  

Self-care
First, be mindful of your own self-care:
  • take a walk
  • exercise
  • get out into nature
  • spend time with friends

Allow yourself and other the space to process what happened.  People will experience a range of emotions; be mindful of this and allow those emotions to run their course.

Laugh
Stephen Colbert explains the importance of laughter and the connection between comedy and Christianity:

I am a Christian and a Catholic, and it's always connected to the idea of love and sacrifice being somehow related and giving yourself to other people and death is not defeat, if you see what I am getting at...

Sadness is like a little emotional death but defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it because that laughter keeps you from having fear of it, and fear keeps you from turning to evil devices to save you from the sadness.  

As Robert Hayden said, we must not be frightened or controlled into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil.  We must keep struggling to maintain our humanity though monsters of abstraction threaten and police us.  

So, if there's a relationship between my faith and comedy, it's that no matter what happens, you are never defeated - you must see this in the light of eternity and find some way to love an laugh with each other.

Don't Go Crazy Listening to Pundits
Stewart explains that we see that there will be lots of pundits guessing about what will happen next, but looking at recent history, we see that they do not really know.  We should be mindful that all of this can be cantankerous noise without merit.



Find Your Agency
Once you are caring for yourself and feeling reasonably stable, find a way to create agency. Even if it is something small, you can pursue things that will help you feel less like a victim and more like you are empowered and making a difference.

  • Eboo Patel: Keep doing what matters to you and the world
  • Scott Shigeoka: Practice curiosity as an act of love
  • Jeremy Adam Smith: Work to promote your values in community
  • Mylien Duong: Get to know other humans
  • Linda R. Tropp: Be a good neighbor, even (and especially) to those who are different
  • Manu Meel: Choose nuance, not outrage
  • Carol Graham: Become a nation of debaters
  • Kurt Gray: Tell your story
  • Kayla DeMonte: Invite people in
Researchers, nonprofit leaders, and other experts share what keeps them optimistic about a better future for American society.
    • Annalee Newitz: Joy is a form of resistance
    • Arlie Hochschild: The common ground is there; we just need to unearth it
    • Tami Pyfer: We’re creating a dignity movement
    • Tania Israel: What gives me hope? You do!
    • Mónica Guzmán: These three hopeful things dwarf my fear
    • Niobe Way: Humans are born to care and connect
And Yet It Moves; Thoughts The Day After by Ken White
What should we do?
I have a few thoughts.
    • Ask Yourself if You’ve Earned The Right To Wallow
    • Reconsider Any Belief In Innate American Goodness
    • Start Out Making a Small Difference
    • Believe Unapologetically
    • Fuck Civility
    • Don’t Let Regression Trick You Into Abandoning Progress
    • Trumpism Is Not The Only Wrong
    • Stay Tuned For Violence
    • Resist

Fight Authoritarianism From Amanda Carpenter:
We put this together last January to warn people about the dangers of a second Trump presidency... these remain the top priority concerns. And here are some baseline ideas on what to do about it. More here: authoritarianplaybook2025.org
 
Art 
This issue of The Marginalian explains the power of art to transform an unstable and chaotic time into a stronger society:

Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state. 

We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. 

Why would people vote for this guy?
Be mindful not to homogenize those who voted for the other party (the out group).  There are many different reasons why people vote for a candidate.  


Social Class, Pride and Voting with Your Middle Finger 
One of the reasons that Trump appealed to so many people is related to social class.  This post explains how the "middle" class has been falling behind over the last 50 years.  They are making less money, but working more and paying more for education, housing, medical care and more.  And they feel left behind by "elites" - politicians and others who fly over their area of the country for the wealthy areas along the coasts and in large cities.  These are the wealthiest places in the country with the most jobs for college educated professionals. These areas vote overwhelmingly democratic, while all of the less wealthy smaller towns and rural areas in between have felt ignored. This group scorns both political parties for this, but they see Trump as a disruptor who is not part of the two party system that is responsible for this.  One sociologist found a voter who said that when they voted for Trump, "We voted with our middle finger." Trump's uncouth manner and vulgar words are appealing because that is partly what makes him NOT the typical candidate; NOT a carefully polished and scripted politician.  They see his flaws as validation for their own flaws.  They voted for him because they feel validated by him and they are voting for pride not policy. This post explains the declining middle class and provides a number of research publications that illustrate this dynamic.

Social class or socio-economic status (SES) is made up of a mix of social indicators that are related to each other. The most straightforward factors are income, wealth, education and location. The median American looks like this:

  • Household income of 75K
  • May or may not have any money saved for retirement (only 50% have a 401K)
  • Owns a house worth about 135K, 1 car worth about 15K, has 5K in the bank.
  • Has some college, but does NOT have a degree.
  • Lives in a metropolitan area of roughly 1.3 million people (2024) such as:


 

 
These maps show how these factors line up with who voted for Trump:


Numerous social scientists have studied the growing social class divide and the connection to Trump's popularity.  Here is a selection of research:   

Joan Williams' Model

 

Another model for the class structure is from Dr. Joan Williams who wrote the book White Working Class; Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.
Dr. Williams' book came out of an article she wrote about the 2016 election posted here in Harvard Business Review.

You can read her article here or watch her Ted Talk below.  The following TED Talk by Dr. Williams.  It is about 15min long, but it is insightful. 

Here is her Ted Talk:

 


“And our place in the material economy is often linked to that in the pride economy. If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and, as we shall see, often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”


Robert Wuthnow's The Left Behind; Decline and Rage in Rural America

Princeton University sociologist, Robert Wuthnow explains the dynamic that Joan Williams describes in his book The Left Behind; Decline and Rage in Rural America that location has strongly affected how rural Americans feel and how they vote.  

Here is a 2018 interview with Professor Wuthnow from Vox.

What is fueling rural America’s outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America’s small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order — the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities—underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans’ anger, their culture must be explored more fully. Wuthnow argues that rural America’s fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. Rural dwellers are especially troubled by Washington’s seeming lack of empathy for such small-town norms as personal responsibility, frugality, cooperation, and common sense. Wuthnow also shows that while these communities may not be as discriminatory as critics claim, racism and misogyny remain embedded in rural patterns of life.



Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land


In her 2016 book, Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right, renown sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains the deep story behind the Tea Party support and the rise of Trump which stems from growing social class inequality happening at the same time as civil rights equality which leaves many White Americans feeling like they are left behind by the government and that they are "strangers in their own land."

 

What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel.  It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not.  What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real.  Dr. Hochschild's idea is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain, 

In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs. Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.



Katherine Cramer's Politics of Resentment
 

Katherine J. Cramer is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she heads the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer’s methodology is unusual and very direct. Instead of relying polls and survey data, she drops in on informal gatherings in rural areas—coffee shops, gas stations—and listens in on what people say to their neighbors and friends. It is a method that likely gets at psychological and social truths missed by pollsters.  Summary from Scientific American is here.

 

  



Janesville, An American Story

 The author explains that Janesville is "a microcosm of what was happening in many places in the country and with many kinds of work, because that’s what’s been happening out of the Great Recession. The unemployment level has fallen, but income levels have stayed quite depressed since before the Great Recession..."






 


In the run-up to the 2016 election, sociologist Jennifer Silva conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a struggling coal town in Pennsylvania. Many of the people she spoke with were nonvoters in 2016 and before. Their politics, she writes in her new book We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America, were often a hodgepodge of left and right. Their views could appear “incoherent or irrational” on the surface: Many of them trusted Donald Trump because of his wealth, for example, even as they supported higher taxes on the rich.

Many of the people Silva interviewed were profoundly cynical about social institutions, government, marriage, and family ties. They had often suffered trauma, such as domestic violence or military-related PTSD, and were in near-constant physical and/or psychological pain. Instead of placing their hope in systems that have failed them repeatedly, Silva finds, they worked to recast their own stories of pain into opportunities for individual self-improvement. Organized into groups of brief profiles from the town she anonymized as “Coal Brook, Pennsylvania,” the book is an unsparing and empathetic portrait of a diverse corner of blue-collar America.

Silva, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, was raised in a working-class family in Massachusetts. Her father dropped out of high school to join the military, and she was the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree. When we spoke on the phone last month, we talked about working-class white people’s affinity for Trump, the rise of conspiracy theories, Hillbilly Elegy, and the lessons that 2020 presidential candidates can take from her research. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Rory McVeigh and Creighton professor Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing
 
Notre Dame Sociology professor Rory McVeigh and Creighton professor Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan’s earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan’s outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.

Andy Kim, NJ Senator 
Kim explains the disdain for politicians in his Twitter thread here. Here is what he learned while campaigning:
Across the board the conversations began with expressions of what I can only describe as deep disgust in politics. Severe distrust in politicians and the status quo. And this wasn’t about the specifics of the moment, but instead deep seated long-term dissatisfaction. Even after 4 yrs in office, Trump wasn’t seen as the status quo or as a “politician.” There was a clear belief that Trump was different. Some raised real concerns about Trump’s policies and personality, but those concerns didn’t override their disgust for politics. The perception that he was different and also taking on the status quo boosted him. In other words, the deep existing distrust in politics and governance gave oxygen to Trump’s strength.
 



Masculinity, Sexism and Misogny

Another dominant force in the election is sexism. 
Jackson Katz has been researching and publishing about masculinity for decades including how it directly plays a role in politics.  Here is Katz on Justin Baldoni's podcast, which is also called Man Enough. 

Why has the U.S. never had a woman president? With Hillary Clinton engaged in a historic campaign that could see her becoming the first woman elected president of the United States, the national conversation about gender and the presidency is gaining critical momentum. Commentators have fixated on the special challenges women candidates for the presidency face: endless media scrutiny abGender has always been a crucial factor in presidential politics. In Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity, Jackson Katz puts forth the original and highly provocative thesis that in recent decades presidential campaigns have become the center stage of an ongoing national debate about manhood, a kind of quadrennial referendum on what type of man—or one day, woman—embodies not only our ideological beliefs, but our very identity as a nation. Whether he is examining right-wing talk radio’s relentless attacks on the masculinity of Democratic candidates, how fears of appearing weak and vulnerable end up shaping candidates’ actual policy positions, how the ISIS attacks on Paris and elsewhere have pushed candidates to assume an increasingly hypermasculine posture, or the groundbreaking quality of Hillary Clinton’s runs for the presidency in 2008 and 2016, Katz offers a new way to understand the role of identity politics in presidential campaigns. In the end, Man Enough? offers nothing less than a paradigm-shifting way to understand the very nature of the American presidency.
See the short trailers below, but for students, the whole documentary is available on Kanopy through your LUC account. 
"The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power & the American Presidency" takes account of Harris’s unexpected entry into the race and explores the deeply gendered cultural and political forces she’s up against. Ranging across five decades of presidential campaigns, the film shows how public perceptions of presidential leadership, and of the office of the presidency itself, have come to be linked in the American imagination with traditional ideas about manhood. It also shows how the Right has weaponized regressive ideas about manhood for decades to cast their opponents as "soft" and appeal to working-class white male voters at the level of identity rather than policy. "The Man Card" is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand why it’s been so hard for a woman to be elected president, and why outmoded ideas about masculinity and power have become central features of American presidential politics.  
Here is a preview to the 2024 update:
 

 

Anti-social Media
The social class and gender dynamics above have been amplified by the widespread use of social media.
 
As the documentary Social Dilemma explains, social media algorithms are designed to gradually, slightly, and imperceptibly change people's own behavior and perception - Changing what people do and think.  This keeps people engaged on the platforms earning more money for the companies that pay for users' attention. The way the algorithm does this is through sharing things that will draw on users' primal emotions: fear and anger. This means finding rabbit holes that will engage the user, even if those rabbit holes are false or conspiracy theories. What's worse is that nefarious agents can pay the social media platforms to  do this. 
 
 Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American Nov 6, 2024)

As Heather Cox Richardson explains, the political atmosphere was, "amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”

X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.



This election in a global context
Another reason that the election may have gone this way is completely out of the control of the campaign. The electorate's post-covid backlash is dissatisfaction with the ruling party. This happened around the globe:

For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, via
@jburnmurdoch
2024 Democrats are the red dot. Absolutely critical context to any postmortem.

Election in Historical Context
This 2020 study from Politico found that the post election effects of the 1919 influenza pandemic led to the rise of right wing authoritarianism on the Nazi Party,
The paper also shows that “influenza deaths of 1918 are correlated with an increase in the share of votes won by right-wing extremists, such as the National Socialist Workers Party” in Germany’s 1932 and 1933 elections.

Exit Polling



From The PEW:
Wide differences in views of how women and men would fare under a Harris or Trump administration


The Political Values of Harris and Trump Supporters; Wide differences over cultural issues, role of government and foreign policy


The Effects 
Many Americans will be emboldened by Trump's hateful and violent rhetoric and his symbolic middle finger to the system.  As in his first time, myriad hate groups came into the forefront to express words and actions of hate and violence.

The Latin Times reports demonstrators carrying signs claiming that women are property on the campus of Texas "Christian" University.



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