Postmortem — did we fail ourselves?
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices … to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill … and suspicion can destroy … and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own-for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is … that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.
- “ The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” by Rod Serling
Now that the election is over, postmortems are popping up all over. Reading the tea leaves before an election campaign is a form of political sorcery. The analysis after the patient is dead- the autopsy- is routinely self-serving punditry. If there is blame to place, a good analysis attributes it and is careful not to oversimplify the cause.
Postmortems are inevitably second-guessing as political black arts. The process is part of the political paradigm we now live with. In this case, political punditry on both sides could claim the right to say ‘they told us so’ because their hedge was that the race was thisclose.
And so, the quadrennial ritual has begun. For Democrats, it would seem there is plenty of blame to go around. Joe Biden was too old, dropped out too late. Kamala should have A instead of B. “Identity politics,’ a crumbling coalition, Hispanics, and angry black men. All somewhat true.
The losers tend to look inwardly and to react to calls to adjust, in this case to new realities that have made Trump’s MAGA movement palatable to voters. The ‘rude and crude’ Republican campaign is now being analyzed in postmortems as pent-up anger and disillusion with a political movement that has served to build the Democratic coalitions over 70 years. It also built a better, more equitable America. The alliance forged by Democrats after the Civil War, their long-held association with racist elements mainly situated in the South, was abandoned by LBJ and moderate elements in both parties to recognize and legitimize voting and civil rights to black citizens denied them by a nation too comfortable in bestowing the promise of our constitution to themselves and their descendants.
The “movement” led by LBJ came with the recognition that there was a price to be paid, a sacrifice made. For the President to pass the legislation- which required bi-partisan Senate support- Johnson opposed Southern Dixiecrats:
The night that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, I found him in the bedroom, exceedingly depressed. The headline of the bulldog edition of the Washington Post said, “Johnson Signs Civil Rights Act.” The airwaves were full of discussions about how unprecedented this was and historic, and yet he was depressed. I asked him why.
He said, “I think we’ve just delivered the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life, and yours.”
What has occurred since the Civil Rights era is the bill that has come due. We are witnessing an end of self-sacrifice and a return to a time when many of us- even some among the Democratic coalition- have become self-ish.
The sacrifice, of course, was a matter of perception. The citizens who were denied their rights always bore the sacrifice. Sharing has become woke; empathy, passe. My postmortem begins with what some would see as simplistic arguments. MAGA and its first cousin, America First is introspective. It encourages grievance based on what we perceive as what is happening to me- poor me, pity me. Just enough of the Democratic coalition decided that their relative discomfort wasn’t worth the effort. In this election, we can be sure that the MAGA base showed up for their idol. The votes prove it as he received about as many votes as he did in 2020 when Joe Biden received over 81 million votes and Trump got a hair over 74 million. Last week, Trump received 74,372,005 votes while Harris got only 70,467,149. With 95% of the vote recorded that is a difference of more than 10 million votes and 11 million fewer votes for the Democratic candidate. Even accounting for the 5% uncounted votes, that suggests about 4.5 million fewer votes cast this year over 2020.
The exit polls indicate immigration and inflation were more compelling issues than women’s reproductive health, which begs the question of why. Trump’s “issues” induced anger and fear among many voters including those in the Democratic coalition and independent voters because they spoke to personal loss versus loss that affected others, specifically young women of childbearing age. Part of the answer is that sacrificing for others was lost to selfish interests.
Both inflation and immigration while real issues, were controllable with legislation. The Biden-Harris policies had reduced inflation and immigration reform could only be solved with bi-partisan support which was denied the American people so that Trump would have it as an issue. Harris made those points for 107 days on the campaign trail.
As postmortems go, this should be easy. It is too easy to lay the blame on Joe Biden, or Harris, or the Democratic Party. It is a fool’s errand. Had Democrats won they could easily been just as likely to be hailed as the reasons for victory. Biden’s self-sacrifice, Harris’s scintillating campaign, the party’s organization contrasted with their counterparts. The problem is more complex than that and it is counterproductive to blame the winners. In truth, policies and issues mattered only to the extent that voters could be convinced they impacted them.
Compared to the generation who endured The Great Depression and the World War the sacrifice asked of our generation should not inspire the anger and fear that has produced MAGA. Much of the sacrifice we face today is self-imposed. It is tied to choices we make refusing to deal with fundamental insecurities in our policies. By all accounts our economy is stable. The conflation of immigration and crime offers a false dichotomy. Immigrants, including illegals, have lower rates of crime than native-born citizens:
The research does not support the view that immigrants commit crime or are incarcerated at higher rates than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants might have less law enforcement contact compared to nonimmigrants…
Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite. Studies have also examined the impact of the concentration of immigrants in a community on crime patterns, finding that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and an increase in structural factors — such as social connection and economic opportunity — that are linked to neighborhood safety.
Immigration and the economy are regularly scapegoated to hide some of the real structural problems that should cause us to be both angry and afraid. The relationship between the GOP and the gun lobby has stymied almost every attempt by the Democrats to pass reasonable gun laws. In an inverse relationship that bedevils Dems, the more gun deaths incite more fear and anger. The gun lobby owns the Republican Party and has been able to mitigate the crime issue caused in rural areas as well as the inner cities by blaming crime on immigrants and a perceived laxness in the criminal justice system. They would exchange sane gun policies for the sham security of arming the nation:
Gun policy continues to be one of the most polarizing issues in American politics. Republicans and Democrats are sharply divided over the impact of gun ownership on public safety: 79% of Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party say that gun ownership increases safety, while a nearly identical share of Democrats and Democratic leaners (78%) say it decreases safety.
Views of gun ownership are also closely tied to where one lives, with those who say they live in rural areas about twice as likely as those who live in urban areas to say that gun ownership increases safety (65% vs. 34%). And those who personally own guns are nearly twice as likely as non-owners to say this (71% vs. 37%).
As evidenced by the data, violent crime is more likely to occur in states with perennial Republican governance, and the coastal states that Republicans cite as “crime-ridden” have lower violent crime rates than their red-state neighbors. Tying gun violence to undocumented immigrants is also a manufactured lie as they are statistically more likely to commit crimes including gun-related crimes than native-born Americans.
Those who call for Democrats to rethink their positions on these issues have a point, but it is a small one. More important is the willingness of an electorate to study issues and vet their information sources. In this election, we chose selfish interests over self-sacrifice. We chose to rationalize our positions by cherry-picking the data. We chose to side with the wrong candidate when all the choices were clear and well-known. We chose a felon and a con artist because we were angry and we wanted someone to tell us why. In a campaign that featured overt racist tropes directed at American citizens and the foulest misogynistic language used to paint their opponents, Republicans made this race about us.
Most postmortems place the blame where it is most comfortable- on the candidate and her party. I suggest we look closer at apportioning responsibility. I suggest we blame ourselves.
Originally published at https://vincerizzo.substack.com.
