By Jason Stanford
I’m struggling to come up with a metaphor that captures the trauma of finding out that the country you love has elected Donald J. Trump. Possibly worse was waking up the next day, laying in next bed without a word of comfort, just the realization that now we’ve gone and done it. Still, I resist accepting that this happened. Even now, someone will unmute the television at work, and I’ll hear his voice and think, “No, that can’t be right.” Maybe there’s no metaphor for trauma, just the symptoms, the continued disbelief that this marvelous experiment in democracy includes a scientifically valid sample of people who considered their choices and picked the one who…
You can fill in your own blank there, but whether you found him unfit because of Access Hollywood or toadying up to dictators or just being tacky, those are all just rationalizations, illustrations on the wall of the cave to give dimension to the beast outside. Our brains construct arguments to articulate the amygdalian howl of terror. Really? Y’all are going to go ahead and LARP the Weimar Republic now? You’re cheering the abdication of a more perfect union? And even that is an intellectual construct, just a way to explain the screaming that started when Trump was declared the winner, and it hasn’t stopped since.
Do I have that about right? It doesn’t take much to trigger the fear that set in when Trump won, whereas it seems strange that less than a year ago Democrats won almost every election worth winning, flipping enough seats in Congress to build a huge majority. And now some of those people we elected are out there calling the president a racist, or demanding government-backed health insurance, or saying that we have to treat the huddled masses yearning to breathe free as if they are guests in our home, and it’s hard to ignore the fear that we’re waking the beast. The panic tastes metallic.
We’re still reacting. As we learned last week, people in DC are so messed up that now even the therapists are depressed. It would be unreasonable to collectively process a trauma while it is still ongoing, and so here we are, still trying to quell the panic, the voice that says he’s probably going to win again, the voice that makes him bigger and stronger than he is, that describes a man for whom every sentence is a choose-your-own adventure as a master debater, that convinces us that none of our candidates could possibly take him down. This is the voice that tells us that the most important thing is not to piss him or his voters off.
My friend was excited when Joe Biden got in the race. He even smiled and said, “He’s someone I can get behind.” When I asked him why, he said Biden would appeal to people like him and made a reference to the white working class voters whose defection cost Hillary the election, even though I’ve told him this isn’t true. My friend is not working class, and though he is white he wasn’t making an overt racial appeal. He meant that Biden wasn’t gay, or black, or a woman. He wouldn’t upset the beast.
This belief that the way to defeat Trump is to make things safe for white people has taken root. In his open letter to the Democratic candidates, Rahm Emanuel warned that advocating for Medicare for All and health care for immigrants would scare “swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.” And far be it for me to quibble with a syllable that Sarah Vowell writes, but in her pitch for Gov. Steve Bullock she dropped this ludicrous expression of the PTSD that I see in too many liberals: “…too much far left jibber-jabber [is] threatening to Mondale-up the electoral map…”
To a lesser extent this argument for electability is what I’m hearing from Bernie. He would have won last time, they say, and he can win this time. His argument in the debate that “he wrote the damn bill” notwithstanding, out on the hustings he’s portraying himself as a different kind of safe choice.
This belief that “electability” is dependent upon making the nominee safe for white people (sorry, “swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio”) is animating the Democratic primary. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the feelings behind my friend, Rahm, and Sarah’s advocacy for safe harbor, and they may very well be correct that Biden might be the best chance to beat Trump. And it should be said that beating Trump has value all on its own absent any progress a Democratic president might make. A Trump presidency has a known baseline cost and an unknown downside. It can always get worse and almost always has.
But this primary is not portrayed as a choice between the electability argument (which sounds nicer than appeasing white people) and the policy proposition. We keep hearing one side propose progressive policies and the other saying that we need to tone it down to appeal to swing voters, and the newspapers tell us this is a choice between liberals and moderates. It’s not. The moderates have policies, to be sure, but their answer to the liberals’ proposals isn’t that their policies are better, just that they won’t scare voters. It’s not about ideology. It’s about panic.
There is growing evidence that the country is reacting to Trump’s presidency in a way that subverts the logic of the panic caucus. Trump got a shade over 46 percent in 2016. Now he’s only got 32 percent saying they will definitely vote to re-elect him with another 12 percent saying they’ll consider it. I’m not great at math, but I can add whole numbers. Meanwhile, Democrats are more satisfied with their choices in the primary than they were in 2008, and voter enthusiasm is way up since 2016.
One underreported shift in the electorate is with the women. The gender gap is double what it was in 2016. If you’re into good news, it looks like Trump has turned college-educated white women into a new part of the Democratic coalition, and he’s even starting to lose a plurality of non-college educated white women.
A majority of Americans think Trump is a racist, tried to “derail or obstruct” the Mueller investigation, was not cleared by that investigation, and think Congress should pass new laws to protect our elections from foreign interference that they expect to come next year. A majority of Americans say that conditions in the migrant camps are “inhumane” and that people in those camps should be released even if there is a risk they won’t show up for court. This is America, but not all of it. The only Americans who are overwhelmingly against all this are Republicans and, by even bigger margins, white, evangelical Christians.
Writing all this down makes this seem more real, but then I go back and re-read the first sentence of the press release where I got these poll numbers and blink: “President Donald Trump is racist, American voters say 51 – 45 percent in a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.” And yet we have credible leaders stand up and say that Elizabeth Warren is going to scare the country, and credible analysts say Democrats are having a liberal-versus-moderate intramural fight.
If that’s true, why is Bernie Sanders doing as well with conservative and moderate Democrats as he is with liberal Democrats?
If this is all about liberals versus moderates, why is Bernie the second choice for Biden voters, and vice versa? And why is Kamala Harris the second choice of Elizabeth Warren voters and not her supposed ideological soulmate, Bernie?
Biden’s status as a frontrunner is largely due to the panic that Democrats might lose again. More Democrats have intensely favorable impressions of Warren and Harris than they do of Biden and Bernie. More Democrats would like to hang out with Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Harris than Biden or Bernie. But if the election were held today, more Democrats would still vote for Biden.
You could almost call this an ideas primary, except that while Harris and Warren are getting online attention for their ideas, most of Biden’s social engagement has to do with polls. It’s not a fight over whose ideas are better. It’s a fight over whether having ideas will scare voters, which is why it landed so hard when Elizabeth Warren said, “I don’t understand why anyone goes through all the trouble of running for president of the United States to just talk about what we can’t do and what we shouldn’t fight for,” which is as close as you can come to LBJs famous question “What good is the Presidency if you don’t do anything with it?” without actually quoting him.
I never really understood FDR’s admonition of not having anything to fear but fear itself. You have to be brave leave the cave and fight the beast. Sitting around and being scared of the fight isn’t going to make it any easier to win. Be ye not afraid.
Jason Stanford is a Texas-based writer and political commentator. Find more at jasonstanford.substack.com
