Denial is Hard to Break

But That Was a Landslide

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Where to start? No seriously, where? There are so many angles, so many entry points, and they’re almost all bad for the party that has held the presidency for twelve of the past sixteen years and still holds the cultural power in most educational institutions, publishing, media, Hollywood, and many corporate settings.

Maybe one window in is that the U.S. have now elected a felon as its president for the first time, which will be read as a negative since it’s the Republicans who have him and the Democrats who orchestrated the legal proceedings—a dangerous precedent, in and of itself—though if it were the Democrats who elected a felon the headline would be very different, a triumph of American open-mindedness and progress for the downtrodden. To note this obvious discrepancy in framing is not, by the way, to say that Donald J. Trump didn’t do anything illegal or something, but if you asked a dozen people on the street what he got convicted for, I would not for one second be surprised if you get just as many answers, and that is some of the catastrophe that is Democrat messaging. If we’re going to convict former presidents, it’s probably a good idea that we’re able to sort of collectively acknowledge and understand what he did and how that broke the law. No technicalities and no ‘he seems like a mean guy.’

Anyway, we probably got—in the 2024 U.S. Presidential election—something like what might have happened in 2020 if Covid hadn’t happened. Electoral counts are still tallying, but what we know is that we’re going to have a second presidential term for Trump (after winning the popular vote for the first time), and he’ll get his shot at governing with majorities in both the House and Senate with the Republicans flipping at least three seats in the Senate. Vice President Harris, meanwhile, appears to have lost all seven (North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona) of the states expected to swing the election after she was, well, anointed to the ticket without so much as winning one vote in a primary election (and a participant in the scheme to shield President Biden’s health decline from the American public). It turns out that maybe Harris’s lack of popularity in the 2020 Democratic Primary wasn’t an anomaly.

It probably won’t surprise anyone who reads this Substack that I think this is all much more about the failure of the Democrats than it is about the success of Republicans, though I will at least give Trump a little of his due. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama…not sure who else is on the list with Trump of the most influential American politicians in my lifetime. Trump somehow manages to be both consistent (the way he has hammered on immigration, for example) and unpredictable (ordering the killing of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani or dragging the Clinton accusers into a presidential 2016 debate after the Trump tape came out) and one of the most resilient human beings on the planet. He’s a force to be reckoned with, and as I’ve pointed out before, pretending that isn’t the case doesn’t do anyone any favors. I’ve certainly been among the people who overlooked him, who didn’t take him seriously before he won the Republican Primary and then the general election in 2016. Takes me a while, I guess, but I’m occasionally capable of letting evidence overwhelm my previous preconceptions, and the Democrats are perfectly capable of doing that, too.

I think that’s actually the biggest problem the Democrats have at the moment. It’s not the math: as recent presidential elections show, they’re perfectly capable of winning. But they’re so used to lying to themselves, and then to the rest of us. They try to live in a world they want to be there instead of the one we’re all beholden to, whether we like it or not.

Please, just buy the hybrid, it’ll help us stop global warming!

‘I can barely pay my grocery bill, and the hybrid is more expensive than what I’ve got.’

You deplorable piece of garbage racist sexist science denier! (Will you vote for us, we’re the more diverse party?)

‘Think I’m going with Trump; he inflates my ego rather than insulting me.’

Obviously this is a playful exaggeration, but less so than it should be. If you are the party wearing trash bags to rallies and polls after the sitting president calls you “garbage” (eight years after the Democrat candidate for president called them a “basket of deplorables)—you are probably winning.

Meanwhile, there are a couple stories from the last few weeks that are worth highlighting in relationship to what happened at the polls yesterday. The first is Mark Cuban’s comments on The View about how Trump “never” seems to associate with “strong, intelligent women.” Cuban was supporting Harris, and his statements were followed with what was surely a coordinated social media campaign of various women who supported Trump—Sage Steele, Riley Gaines, Tulsi Gabbard, Megyn Kelly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Danica Patrick, others—saying how insulting it was.

Those women speaking out highlight the first problem with what Cuban said, i.e. the empirical nature of it, the potential inaccuracy, but there is also a qualitative problem with it. In Mark Cuban’s mind, and in the mind of the average educated, middle- or upper-class liberal, there are two categories of women, “the strong, independent ones” who prioritize careers, who may be single (several of the responders above actually fit this category), and then there are the Melanias. Granted, most of us don’t know very much about Trump’s wife, and that’s probably intentional on her part, but we do get the perception that she is quiet, maybe even “submissive.” She had a career, but it doesn’t seem to be her identity. And here’s the thing: while there’s nothing wrong with being Danica Patrick (and there doesn’t seem to be many Republicans actually refuting that these days), there’s also nothing wrong with women who decide to take a few years off from work to raise kids and maybe who even want men, husbands, who lead and take initiative and provide. Indeed, the data would tell us that most women who are dating want a man who makes more money than them.

Let’s move on to the Algerian Olympic boxer, Imane Khelif, who won gold on the female side, in spite of an Italian who did not finish her match against Khelif and the reality that Khelif and another boxer from Taiwan who also won gold had been disqualified from women’s competition by the International Boxing Association, an organization that used to mean something to the International Olympic Committee, though they’ve parted ways recently. Well, this week, a report surfaced that a French reporter had obtained a leak of medical documents that indicate that Khelif has XY chromosomes and testicles (though not necessarily in a traditional sense—it seems to be one of a few categories that encompass what we call intersex). This seems to align, by the way, with what a few boxers Khelif has competed with along the way have said and even with something Khelif’s coach said.

It’s not a slam-dunk “she’s male!” but the report, if accurate, is precisely the kind of thing that fits into this debate about gender and sports, and if we’re getting medical documents leaked because there are a lot of powerful people who were lying about all of this (at the risk of injuring those who boxed against Khelif), including people with the Olympics (and I won’t be one ounce surprised if that was the case), well, you can see why people might be upset about this. Naturally mainstream media hasn’t touched the recent report after lecturing us all that Khelif hadn’t been raised male and wasn’t trans (as if that answered all the relevant questions). It does seem that Khelif was characterized as female at birth perhaps because of unorthodox genitals, all of which appear to have been part of the discovery of the gender test by the boxing federation (‘It’s Russian corruption!’ we were assured over the summer).

Now Khelif, who is initiating various legal actions, has been publicly humiliated by the sequence of events here, but that did not need to be the case. There are, as far as I can see, three ways we can handle situations like these: 1) with transparency while arguing that the person in question merits inclusion in female sports regardless of XY chromosomes and male-ish genitalia (this is at least honorable, though it is unlikely to stand up to public scrutiny, which is probably why it’s not the route that’s being chosen), 2) transparency while reluctantly disqualifying a participant from participating in female sports but welcoming them in the male arena, or 3) denying and burying while trying to cram the participant through female sports regardless. Number three legitimately seems to be the side of Democrats right now, just as it is and has been with consequential medical interventions for trans people, which I’ve said elsewhere I don’t outright oppose as long as it’s adults who are choosing it and that there is honest data being collected on long-term outcomes. The obfuscating route, however, provides someone, anyone, with the opportunity to speak with more clarity in ways that also may align with public perception. Hence, Trump using this issue so explicitly in television ads.

In this election way more than either 2016 or 2020, a lot of the free-thinking, independent types were not just not explicitly supporting Harris, they were freely saying (to big audiences, in some cases!) they were voting for Trump. Many of these were women like the ones listed above who went after Cuban, but there was also that guy with the last name of Kennedy (!), there was Jennifer Sey who produced Athlete A (a documentary film that advocated for the gymnasts who were sexually abused by Larry Nassar from Michigan State), there was Heather Heying (an evolutionary biologist who basically got cancelled a few years back at Evergreen State), and comedian and podcaster Bridget Phetasy. These sure as hell weren’t people lining up for Trump in 2016! Heying in particular was a Sanders supporter.

So why now? I suspect, in large part, it is because of the current Democrats’ willingness to go to great lengths (including trying to tell social media companies what to do!) to censor mainstream perspectives. We saw that with Covid, we’re seeing it with the female boxing stuff above, and we see it with any potential inconveniences to narratives about climate science. Should I mention that Trump took advantage of the chance to interview with both Joe Rogan and Dave Ramsey, though he’d previously had public spats with Rogan and there were obvious cultural (read: religious) differences between he and Ramsey. Harris, on the other hand, got both invites but couldn’t be bothered. You have to fight for votes!

I do pay attention to some of the people above, even if I couldn’t quite land at voting for—let alone “endorsing”—Trump myself. I am, to be sure, the skeptical, independent type, though the truth is that I have never voted for him, in either a primary or presidential election. I was never going to vote for Hillary, either, in 2016, so I voted third-party Progressive at that time, and I plugged my nose and voted for Biden in 2020, while writing someone in this time who obviously isn’t a serious candidate with any shot at winning. A protest vote, you could say, and I’m comfortable with that. All of the above after sitting out 2008 and 2012, though I intended to write in Ron Paul in Florida in 2008 and naively said that to the Democrat who was supposedly registering me to vote, only to receive a notification in the mail a few weeks later that there had been a “problem” of some sort with my paperwork. I should have voted in 2012, but I was abroad at the time and in a year following the death of my brother, and I just couldn’t motivate myself to navigate the absentee process.

I was probably closest to pulling the lever for Trump in 2020 and perhaps would have done it if Covid hadn’t happened. This time I just couldn’t un-see the shitty way Trump went out in 2020, and by that I do not mean January 6, as I find the loose associations with which he is accused of in regard to that day to be very lazy (legal teams who would love to “get him” seem to have come to the same conclusion). I do, however, think he was pretty obnoxious and less-than-implicit in winking at his Vice President at the time, Mike Pence, who Trump seemed to think might be willing to not certify the election, much to his own disappointment. Trump also should have conceded and gone to the Biden Inauguration, things a bigger man would have done.

And yet, I do remember the roaring economy of Trump’s first term, I remember a time when I wasn’t leaving the grocery store feeling like I just got taken out back and paddled by someone who had no authority to punish me. I remember Trump being on the right side of the Covington boys controversy in D.C. and the right side, shortly after, of the Jussie Smollett idiocy.

Trump’s rhetoric on race and even gender often isn’t helpful, and yet if the alternative is a careful language game that’s shaped by a racial essentialism that requires us to make certain assumptions whether or not they happen to line up with our life experience, well, good luck Dems, and please do keep me posted on how it’s going. Last night was another reminder of “how it’s going” and another opportunity for the party that got crushed nationally to reflect on whether all this is really helping anyone. As I already mentioned, if there has been one issue Trump has lived on since he ran in 2016 it is immigration, and it seems to resonate more often than it doesn’t, much to the dismay of folks who want something like an “open” border. I do not want mass deportation, but if we’re going to work at creating pathways to citizenship for the undocumented among us, then I also want a functional border, I want the challenge of giving the world’s refugee a new life to be shared, and I don’t want our immigration programs and systems to be a coded way to attain votes for the Democrats. See, for example, Coleman Hughes’ recent Free Press piece about the shadiness of a referendum on Puerto Rican statehood, a position I could support if the people there want it! From an economic standpoint, it seems fairly-obvious that if you’re going to be constantly flooding the system with more poor people that the people who are likely to be the hardest hit by this are not going to be rich people, but rather poor ones. And yes, in a world of finite resources, I’m fine with first attending to the plight of the people next to us, our neighbors and community members and colleagues—and then with what we have left over (which doesn’t appear to be much given the disaster that is our budget and national debt) we can make strategic investments around the world where people are suffering. Put your own life vest on first.

This party we’re told is “liberal” and “progressive” while also being full of, you know, formally educated people, must re-commit itself to elevating the material lives of people who may not be. No matter what race or gender these people are. Indeed, we currently have a society of men who are struggling with employment and wages, who are getting crushed in college admission and graduation, who are drowning in opiate addictions, and too many of whom die by suicide. It’s high time for Democrats to stop attacking these people and to actively start trying to help them. Though I don’t always agree with his proposed solutions, center lefty Richard Reeves is doing a decent job of driving this message.

As Reeves isn’t shy about pointing out, this doesn’t mean we ought to abandon women or not celebrate their gains, and most of us ought to realize anyway that the present and future destinies of husbands and sons and brothers and grandfathers…are tied to their wives and sisters and daughters and grandmothers. Much gets made about the diversity and/or lack of diversity of political parties, and as I watched, simultaneously the CNN television broadcast last night for a while before muting and turning on The Free Press’s Internet broadcast (or, after they called it a night, Megyn Kelly’s) one thing that came up multiple times was that Trump seems to have gained double digit improvements with African American and Latino men and that his gains among these populations surpassed anything Harris did with women, in spite of how loudly we kept getting told about how important the loss of Roe v. Wade was for women in particular. I suspect much of this is also connected to the different way women choose to live out their own lives, whereas the faulty assumption seems to always be that women are going to line up for a particularly-academic version of feminism or something.

Now just because last night was very good for Trump and the Republicans (and it was) doesn’t mean the next four years will be. They could be great or terrible or in-between—and time will tell. I did not make it very far into Trump’s speech last night because the genre isn’t really my thing but also because he kind of bored me. He seemed tired and uninspired, though he was surrounded by enthusiasts, and way more of a broad entourage than he ever had in 2016 or 2020. I’m not so sure we didn’t just elect someone who’s cognitive abilities will be every bit as in trouble by the end of this term as Biden’s have been in his. I also don’t know how much Trump spending our system can handle without significant reform in our government budgets and if he will have the kind of discipline and focus such reform would entail.

It is one thing to reject soundly so much of what Democrats have offered—and I have largely argued here that they deserve most of that—but it is a very different thing to govern in ways that stay attractive to millions of people who will rightly be impatient if they don’t start seeing more-favorable numbers at the grocery store and the gas pump and at their jobs. For Democrats, the “easy” path will be retreating to their victim playing and name-calling (though it was Trump who was shot at more than once on the campaign trail, a fact that doesn’t seem lost on most of the country).

The harder path, the truer path, would be to shed the self-righteousness and the great effort that’s being put in to quell and quiet the very real disagreements that our lives together present while trying to understand why so few people are buying the vision Democrats don’t seem to think they should even have to sell.