Post-Election Reflection

It’s been about two months since the 2024 General Election. There’s been a whole lot of “analysis” about the election. I think most of it is just spin where people conclude what they want to conclude so they can sound smart. It’s kind of like all the pre-election predictions from people. Here’s what you need to know about predicting elections – don’t. We make a bad assumption that people are rational and will do rational things when they vote. Some do, but the vast majority of people aren’t rational when it comes to voting and haven’t ever been. It’s not anything new.

Most of the analysis I have heard attempts to explain the election results down to just one or a handful of reasons. These are the common reasons for the election that I have heard stated:

• That there are a lot of racists/sexist voters (there are other variations of this – like people who won’t vote for a black woman).
• Inflation (the cost of daily things was just too high and the current administration wasn’t doing anything about it.
• Mismanagement (The Harris Campaign raised $1 Billion in a short period of time and still ended with a debt – what does that say about management?)
• Nostalgia (People selectively remembered life as better under the first Trump presidency – while making excuses for things like COVID)
• Media (there’s a whole range associated with this – from fact checking, to alternative media, to paying attention to the wrong things, etc).
• Entertainment (The argument being that people want to be entertained and supposedly Trump is entertaining)
• Education (again, there’s a range here too – from Ivy League Schools screwing things up, to uneducated voters, to wokeness, to a whole host of things)
• Trust (There are plenty of people who just don’t trust government and vote for a campaign that is anti-government)
• Conspiracies (Nothing is more American that conspiracy theories)

That’s just a the common analysis I’ve heard. The reality is that there is probably some truth to all of these things combined, but that’s still simplifying things a bit much.

I think there’s also a few other things that add to this – things that aren’t so tangible.

Richard Slotkin, in his book “A Great Disorder” talks about national myths and how they drive so much of our national narrative. He names five sets of myths – the Frontier Myth, the Founding Myth, the Civil War Myths (The Lost Cause, and the Reuniting Feuding Brothers), the Good War Myth, and the Myth of the Movement. Slotkin wrote that the Trump campaign tapped into three of the national myths (Frontier, Founding, Lost Cause), and that the MAGA movement could rule, but could not govern. And likewise, Slotkin argued that the Democrats were essentially disorganized and did not tap into any national myths.

This is a pretty good analysis that turned out to be true related to the election, and it taps into some of those more intangible elements around the election and larger things pertaining to the nation.

I heard people say that Trump is the exception to who we are. I disagree. I don’t think Trump is the exception to who America is, but rather the embodiment of what America has been in practice pretty often.

Let me explain. You see I don’t think 2024 was really about Trump and Harris.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the phrase “That’s not who we are,” when something terrible happens, or something awful is said. But that phrase is not accurate. What is really means is “That’s not who we aspire to be.” There’s a significant difference between these two things though.

Often, whatever it is we are horrified by is a prime example of who we actually are as a nation and what we allow. It’s just that we don’t like being shown who we are without any filter of a national myth, or aspiration to something better.

As a nation, we are horrible about facing our own actual history because if we did, we’d have to deal with reality, which we don’t like.  We would have to admit that broken people acted like broken people. We would have to do something to repair the damage that was done. We much prefer to look at the aspirations of the nation and claim that’s who we are.  We prefer nostalgia and selective memory because that allows us to keep telling ourselves that we are what we aspire to, rather than who we actually are.

This election was about more than Trump and Harris. It was about more than all the earlier list. It was also about the national myths that Slotkin wrote about. And this was an election deciding on who we are and have been in reality vs. who we aspire to be and claim to be.  In this election, the voters chose who we are and have been.

That conflict came out in the slogans of the campaigns – Make America Great Again vs. We are not going back.

But let me go back to the main premise that I made earlier – that Trump is the embodiment of what America has been often. He’s been publicly stating some wild things – like buying Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, making Canada the 51st state, etc. This is what Frontier Myth looks like. The US has a long history of expanding its land – sometimes through the use of force and sometimes by buying land. It’s just been awhile since we did this. But history shows that the 1800’s were full of American expansion. You can look it up.

American history is also full of challenges around immigration and who is considered a citizen and who belongs here. The US has broken every treaty it made with Indigenous Tribes, forced indigenous people from their land, imposed laws and rules on people of color denying their citizenship, said those with Chinese dissent were not citizens, fought over birthright citizenship, fought over who can vote, and more. Most of our history has been debating who’s “American.” Trump seems intent on continuing that debate.

The Gilded Age lasted from the late 1870’s to the late 1890’s. It was a time marked by economic expansion, material excess, widespread political corruption, rich Barrons controlling entire industries, xenophobia, Jim Crow laws, and more. It was called Gilded because the surface appeared golden, but underneath that surface was rot. In many ways, we seem to be in a second Gilded Age.   

This past election wasn’t really about Trump and Harris so much as it was about the American voter and who the voters see America as – who we have been, or who we aspire to be. In hindsight and given that we are in conflicted and troubled times, should we be surprised that the voters chose familiarity rather than aspiration. The election results say far more about the American voter than it does about Trump or any other politician.

And it leaves me scratching my head wondering why the American voter continues to insist on America being who it has been, rather than what it could be. Maybe the answer is that we don’t actually believe the aspirations we claim to believe in – that we know they are fantasy and unrealistic. Maybe the answer is that we are afraid – it’s just a matter of what. Maybe the answer is that we aren’t all that different from the rest of humanity, in spite of our American exceptionalism rhetoric. Maybe the answer is all that and more.

Who we aspire to be has always been in conflict with who we have been. Sometimes we lean into the aspirations – like when we passed amendments to the Constitution expanding the definition of citizenship to more people. And sometimes we lean into who we have been – like when we pass laws restricting people’s citizenship, voting, and lives.

But here’s the beautiful thing about this – Voting for who we were never gets the final say in the end. No matter how many times we try it. That’s because there are always those who keep pushing the nation towards its aspiration. Pushing the nation to be better than it has been. Pushing the nation for its own good, sometimes kicking and screaming.