Heading into Tuesday’s vote, a large majority of voters said that the country was on the wrong track and that they were disappointed with the candidates on offer. A plurality of voters said that regardless of who was elected, the next president would make things worse. Nearly 80 percent said the presidential campaigns did not make them proud of America.
The blame for this grievous state of affairs lies with the Democratic and Republican Parties, both of which played a game of chicken with the electorate, relying on apocalyptic threats about the end of democracy to convince people that they had no choice but to vote as instructed. Both candidates offered up policies that were unpopular even among their supporters, serving a banquet for their donor classes while doling out junk food to their bases. For one candidate, that contemptuous strategy succeeded. But it fails the American people.
For all his populist posturing, Mr. Trump put forward tax breaks that favor the wealthy, championed tariffs that would almost certainly raise grocery prices, bad-mouthed overtime pay, praised firing striking workers and largely stayed mum while his allies discussed destroying the Affordable Care Act. He insisted abortion be left up to the states even though most Americans, including many Republicans, think it should be legal everywhere, and pledged to oppose any new gun restrictions even though an overwhelming majority of Americans say they should be stricter.
And what were Trump acolytes to be given in return for greenlighting this unpopular agenda? Elon Musk promised a period of economic pain. Tucker Carlson said Mr. Trump would bend the country over his knee and give it a “spanking.” Why would any sign on? Because it was either that, they were told, or nuclear war under Ms. Harris. Some choice.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden and his enablers disregarded the public’s belief that he was too old to serve another term. When he finally did step aside — only after a televised disaster that set his floundering campaign on fire — the Democratic Party circumvented democracy by simply crowning his replacement. On some policies — most notably reproductive rights — Ms. Harris was in alignment with voters. But she quickly began sending signals that she wouldn’t go too far with the progressive economic policies that Mr. Biden had wrenched from the stifling neoliberal norm.
She refused to say she would keep Lina Khan, the trustbusting Federal Trade Commission chair, who is wildly popular with Democrats and even some Republicans (but not, crucially, with her money men). She refused to support an arms embargo against Israel even though a June poll found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Independents want it. And all the while she gave badly needed Arab and Muslim voters the cold shoulder, cozied up to the sleazy crypto industry and touted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a man who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. Ms. Harris made a high-risk bet that — because Mr. Trump truly did pose a threat to democracy — when push came to shove, most Americans would overcome their frustration with her.
For the better part of a decade, American discourse has been consumed by emergency politics: a collective insistence that we are teetering on the knife’s edge of collapse, an anxiety that both parties were all too happy to exploit in order to hold their voters captive. This year that impulse reached its apotheosis.
What we just went through was not an election; it was a hostage situation. Our major parties represent the interests of streaming magnates, the arms industry, oil barons, Bitcoin ghouls and Big Tobacco, often without even pretending to heed the needs of voters. A political system like that is fundamentally broken.
A poll from this spring found that about half of voters 30 or younger believe that it doesn’t matter who wins elections. Describing the burgeoning nihilism of this generation, one pollster told Semafor, “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”
The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant once observed that “intensely political seasons spawn reveries,” fleeting periods of high romance when sudden change feels possible. Those reveries turn not on true hope, but on a kind of “cruel optimism” that political figures, parties and processes inevitably betray. One way to understand the country’s mood today — and the cynicism of those who came to political adulthood post-2008 — is as one long hangover from the cruel optimism of the Obama Era: the highs of a “hope” and “change” campaign that cashed out as, and crashed into, more of the same, chased by three straight presidential elections of take it or leave it. Yet this decade of despair may be, in its own way, a kind of opportunity.
“The cure might come from the same source with the distemper,” the philosopher Edmund Burke once wrote, reflecting on political dysfunction in his own time. If we are ever to exit the emergency spiral we are trapped in — in which Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of Book of Revelation horrors while each shoehorns policies that cater only to their respective elites — then we need to be willing to demand better.
A threat to democracy does not exempt leaders from giving voters a plan for the future, one that speaks to their concerns and that reflects the America they want to live in. Indeed, the greater the threat, the more important it is to do the work of winning voters over, rather than just giving them an ultimatum.
If we want out of our decade-long impasse, we need to stop letting candidates skate by on alarmist excuses. When candidates don’t even have the decency to sell us magic beans, when they tell us we simply have no choice but to vote for them, we need to run in the other direction. And at the extremes of frustration, more of us need to run for office — against the anointed, against incumbents, as independents if necessary — even if defeat is certain, even if they yell that you are “spoiling” a race that was spoiled before anyone ever cast a ballot.
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