Just get 'er done, damnit!
People are still trying to figure out why the election turned out as it did. My working hypothesis is that (i) anger and alienation about wokeness, (ii) Biden-caused inflation (mostly a mirage), and (iii) the border immigration mess were the top reasons for Harris losing. The Hill discusses data from a recent poll:
Our poll, the first postelection poll specifically focused on trust in government, reveals that while voters are less trusting of the government as a result of the election, they believe the government will be more effective and can get things done.
Put another way, our poll suggests that Democrats ran the wrong campaign. Whereas they ran a “values campaign,” focused on a government Americans could trust, what voters really wanted was an effective government, and on that, they preferred Donald Trump.Indeed, we found that a plurality (39 percent) of Americans said the 2024 election results made them less trusting of the government. Similarly, a 41 percent plurality of Americans say the election makes them less confident that the government will share “fair and accurate information.”
And yet, a plurality (40 percent) of Americans believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward, versus 36 percent of Americans saying the government will be less effective.
Among independents, the discrepancy is even more pronounced, underscoring this voting bloc’s desire for an effective government over one that is trustworthy.
By a 13-point margin (39 percent to 26 percent), independents said they are less — rather than more — trusting of government following the election. And by a similar 11-point margin (39 percent to 28 percent), they feel less — rather than more — confident that the government will share fair and accurate information going forward.
That is a take on it that I wasn't aware of. Some people want government to do something, even if it amounts to doing bad things. I'm among the 40% plurality of Americans who believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward. The things I am highly confident it will get done is mounting and sustaining an all-out attack on American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. That applies especially to minorities that God and MAGA both hate and want to oppress.
How far DJT, MAGA, the billionaire oligarchs and Christian nationalists will get in their quest for corrupt authoritarianism is the open question. I suspect they will get pretty far because there is nothing likely to stop or significantly slow them that I can see. DJT and MAGA definitely are gonna try to git 'er done come hell or high water.
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Institutional distrust
A Novel Theory of Why Trust in Everything Is Declining
The evidence that residents of the United States don’t trust their institutions goes beyond election results. It’s also visible in the falling number of Americans who get news from what were once known as “mainstream” sources, and in the declining share of people who say in polls that they, uh, trust institutions.
Whose fault is this? Some influential voices toward the center of the political spectrum—Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt—blame the influence of bumbling, know-it-all leftist elites in media and politics. Silver calls it the Indigo Blob, an informal alliance of “progressive institutionalists”—educated media figures, academics, activists, and political staffers who (among other things) pushed the Democratic Party too far left on social justice and “identity politics” issues, triggering a working-class backlash over issues ranging from police reform to COVID-era shutdowns. To that list, Yglesias would add issues of “biological sex” (i.e., trans rights), while Leonhardt blames the left for Biden’s alleged lenience on border security. Broadly, they say, the self-appointed progressive “expert class” and its values are out of step with the public.The federal judge who issued a key ruling ordering Biden to reopen the border to asylum applicants was a 77-year-old first appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. These perceived institutional failures can’t entirely be pinned on highly educated progressives.
Americans also despise—or at least distrust—a number of groups that aren’t affiliated in the common imagination with Democrats or liberals at all. “Defunding the police” might not be popular, but only a modest 51 percent of respondents in Gallup’s trust survey this year said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police as an institution. “The medical system” clocked in at 36 percent, churches and organized religion at 32 percent, and both banks and “large technology companies” at 27 percent. “Big business” (16 percent) was one of the least popular institutions named in the poll, ....Perhaps the answer has something to do with the first institution I mentioned: Our beloved free press. Thanks to the innovative work that tech monopolies have done in the advertising market, it’s increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting. That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.
All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest. What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit.
Groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime. It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.[Stanning in politics refers to the phenomenon where individuals exhibit an intense, often obsessive, form of support for political figures, akin to the fanatical devotion seen in celebrity fandoms. This term has evolved to describe a deeply personalized and extremely online devotion to politicians, characterized by one or more of (i) one-sided relationships with politicians, feeling a personal connection despite no real interaction, (ii) development of cult of personality where politicians are the center of a cult-like following and supporters view them as saviors or messianic figures, (iii) extreme devotion that leads to a lack of accountability with politicians not held responsible for their bad actions or corrupt policies, (iv) etc. .... In summary, stanning in politics represents a shift where political support transcends traditional voter-politician relationships into something more akin to celebrity fandom, with all its associated behaviors and implications for political engagement and accountability.]On the other side of the partisan spectrum, the ascendant figures are free/non-thinkers like RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan who “question everything,” even things that don’t need questioning, like the polio vaccine or federal deposit insurance.Why don’t our institutions, with the exception of the hornet eradication apparatus, work? One reason might be that polarization-optimized discourse does not tend to build consensus around measured, fair, and accurate assessments of institutional failures. It fails to create the shared sense that something scandalous is happening; even when Republicans and Democrats are both angry about the same thing, it can be for different reasons.Having just written an entire article about the dangers of universalized single-cause explanations, though, I would be remiss in putting the blame for dysfunction and discontent entirely on the media. As a mid-level member of the Indigo Blob, I also believe the usual suspects are at fault too: money in politics and the sclerotic U.S. legislative system, the failure of regulation to check the stock market’s collective expectation of indefinite earnings growth, the concentration of wealth and rise in the relative cost of basic components of the American Dream, bad-faith right-wing propaganda, the refusal of older generations to loosen their grip on their property values and political norms, blah blah blah.
Without a system that can build consensus, though—even the kind of phony, hypocritical, ideologically bracketed consensus we used to manufacture right here at home when this country was great—all of that stuff is academic.
On reflection, I'm confused by that analysis. Not sure what the point is. In summary: Various things caused the results we got.
And that ends this incisive update about what happened and why.
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