Post election analyses: One narrative about what just happened

Dozens of narratives about what just happened and why are floating around out there. Many more will probably be forthcoming. The narratives from radical right authoritarians, self-professed MAGA “conservatives” are quite different from those coming from non-MAGAlandia. I plan to post at least two non-MAGAland narratives to give people a sense of the kind of thinking that is going on outside MAGAlandia. This one is by Ben Rhodes, formerly in the Obama administration. Tomorrow I'll post Masha Gessen's narrative. 

In a NYT opinion Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, offers his take on the election (not paywalled):

[In 2019] I met with a [Hong Kong pro-democracy] government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.

Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to building a separate one, drained of democratic values.

In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — hollowed out communities while enriching a global oligarchy. Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional national and religious identities. After 9/11, the war on terror was embraced by autocrats such as Mr. Putin, who used it as a frame to justify power grabs while forever wars fueled mass migration. The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end. Then social media’s explosion offered a vehicle to spread grievance and conspiracy theories, allowing populist leaders to radicalize their followers with the precision of an algorithm.  

The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.  

Yet now Mr. Trump has decisively won back the presidency. I would never claim to have all the answers about what went wrong, but I do worry that Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” — that most Americans distrust. As a party interested in competent technocracy, we lost touch with the anger people feel at government.  

Yes, this is unfair: Republican policies from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush did far more than Democrats to create this mess. But Mr. Trump’s crusade against the past elites of his own party — from the Bush family to Mitch McConnell — credentialed him with a public hungry for accountability, while the Harris campaign’s embrace of Dick Cheney conveyed the opposite message.  

Donald Trump has won the presidency, but I don’t believe he will deliver on his promises. Like other self-interested autocrats, his remedies are designed to exploit problems instead of solving them, and he’s surrounded by oligarchs who want to loot the system instead of reforming it.  

Out of the wreckage of this election, Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on ourselves — what we stand for, and how we tell our story. That means acknowledging — as my Hong Kong interlocutor said — that “the narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed.” Instead of defending a system that has been rejected, we need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next. 

The idea that the narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed strikes me as having a lot of truth in it. The idea that a Chinese official in Hong Kong watching the collapse of democracy there makes sense. Maybe his US outsider position made it easier to see what probably most Americans cannot easily accept. Worse, the forces arguing for liberalism and democracy are themselves significantly undermined by special interest power and wealth, which in my opinion are inherently authoritarian and inherently pro-corruption.

The question Rhodes raises is this: What are the alternative visions for what kind of democracy comes next? I’d like to think it is a tolerant democracy that is at least modestly more uncoupled from left-right politics and more honestly focused on serving the public interest in a different mental framework (pragmatic rationalism maybe?). But we have to deal with the poisonous power of dark free speech and toxic social media, and the unshakable false realities they create. It’s not clear to me that a new vision can compete and win against that monstrosity. I think MAGA will probably have to implode on its own before a new vision of democracy has a chance to regain its footing.