Making political predictions is easy; noticing how society operates is hard.
I am disconsolate. I am an optimist, but I see no silver lining in the election results. Trump made clear what he was and the American people supported him and none of them deserve what will happen to them if Trump carries out even some of his promises: deporting eleven million people, adding tariffs that will lead to a big recession , jailing his enemies, replacing civil service with political appointees, using the military against civilians, and caving into Putin and other dictators. The New Yorker blames Biden for not having left the race earlier, and I can blame the judiciary for not moving its indictments into trials, but the real blame or responsibility is that the people voted for a clearly monstrous candidate. People excused or endorsed Trump's blemishes. The only upswing was that the election was decisive even if not overwhelming, the electoral college favoring Trump; so that there is no question which candidate was elected. Getting rid of the electoral college would open up endless recounts everywhere to add a few thousand votes to one side or the other. An election has to be definitive if it is to be considered legitimate.The rest of us have to regroup and hunker down for the onslaught. Maybe he is so incompetent to do much but his henchmen will do these things and J. D. Vance would be worse because he is smarter.. But I can't spend four years watching "The West Wing" reruns. A forum on silent movies? A Revolutionary Era set of Committees of Correspondence? Take your pick.
The most benign prediction of what the Trump Administration will be like is offered by Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC who was a writer of "The West Wing” and an expert on idealized presidencies. He says that Trump will golf a lot and not spend much time at the office. And there is a point that Trump is more engaged with being vindicated by being reelected than by governing. He will leave the governing to Elon Musk, who will reorganize the executive branch by getting rid of civil servants in the name of efficiency, which is bad enough, and leave health policy to Robert Kenedy, Jr, who will revamp health care, which is alsop bad enough, and leave the rest to the presumptive new Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, who is an orthodox Republican rather than a Populist and who has previously been an operative for conservative Republicans like Ambassador John Huntsman, the philanthropist Mormon who learned Chinese as a missionary and was Ambassador to China under Obama. She would be a responsible person who would avoid the limelight to be in Trump's good graces, and operate the West Wing. But I think otherwise. There are more malign figures like those of the Stephan Miller sort who would deport a lot of people and the rest of the Project 2025 crowd who would dismantle the federal government. Yes, Trump is a braggart and that is combined with being a scaredy cat who won’t challenge strongmen like Putin and so give Ukraine away, but his own animus and malignancy is bad enough to fool around with the constitution and bad policies. More likely as Bette Davis said in “All About Eve”,”its a rocky road ahead”.
Traditional orthodox Republicans also think that a second Trump Administration will also be relatively benign because reality will intrude on Trump’s impulses and publicly vaunted policies. No more than 80,000 or slo illegal aliens will be deported on the basis of them being felons because many more deportations than that would be very expensive given the cost of creating and maintaining detention centers and hiring law enforcement to arrest them. But Trump might decide neither to process or house potential deportees, just put all they find to be suspicious on trucks and dump them over the border. Similarly, Trump could get a law through Congress to simply eliminate people with legitimate credentials and seniority in a mass cancellation of the federal bureaucracy. Congress could also raise tariffs and wait to see what would happen, a kind of disaster that would take half a year to have its impact. Putting Pelosi and Schiff in jail is indeed an unlikely pipe dream but everybody agrees that all of Trump's indictments will go away even if Jack Smith leaves behind a final report, only an anti-Trumpists caring about the contents of Jack Smith's reports.We will all survive Trump’s term and the Republicans will return to being a conservative rather than a populist party, embracing Latinos, a constituency that has been growing for decades and no longer needing Trump’s populist juices.
Liberals are finding any number of reasons Harris lost. Maureen Dowd blames Democrats for being elitist and overly woke, but I note that big plutocrats like Elon Musk were behind Trump and that did not bother the voters and that Biden was on the picket line for workers and saying that collective bargaining should settle labor disputes. Nancy Pelosi blames Biden for not having left earlier so there could have been a full fledged primary race and so familiarize the pub;llic with the eventual nominee. But Biden seemed fine even if a bit stiff before the debate which forced him out and more than a hundred days is long enough for an election race between the two standard bearers. Voters said they didn’t know enough about Harris, but what did you have to know? She was a constitutionalist and her opponent was an insurrectionist. Being a constitutionalist seems a mighty low bar until the opponent breaches it. The choice was clear but Trump supporters treat the democracy issue as just one among many rather than the fundamental one. Some Progressives think Latinos preferred to identify with white rather than identify with their ethnic roots, which they regard as a leftover from settler colonialism. But don ‘t we want people to become more assimilated, more Americanized, over the generations? Latinos remain Catholic and conservative and so likely candidates for the Republicans. Maybe the real shift to Trump may be that every once in a while a candidate comes along whose personality encaptures the public imagination, regardless of party. That happened with Eisenhower and Reagan. The Biden victory in 2020 was an aberration even if it was not rigged.What Liberals are not willing to admit, however, is that two female candidates were defeated. Two strikes are out. I(t will be a generation before a woman is nominated again. Voters don’t want them. And even if Josh Shapiro had won Pennsylvania, the whole race would have been tilted into a debate about Gaza. So only male Catholics and Protestants need bother to apply for the Presidency for the foreseeable future.
Instead of this prospect of either a returned normalcy after Trump or facing an onslaught against democratic humanitarianism, let us look to sociological concepts whereby structured and processes are abstracted so as to provide contexts which allow explanations rather than prognostications. According to Georg Simmel, an election is an antagonistic conflict whereby sides compete against one another rather than, as in horse races, a competitive conflict, against time. An election therefore means that one side bests the other side not by absolute standards, such as time but having scored more points than the opponent even if less than in another contest. Trump may be vulgar and whining but that is translated into being forthright by comparison while Harris laughs too much and plays it safe, qualities in other contests that would be regarded as virtues rather than vices. Reagan was liked for his affability but neither Truman nor Dewey were particularly affable. Different elections, different contests. Some baseball teams go for the long ball and some don't.
Simmel, speaking particularly about elections as contests, knew that an election was concerned with its own rules. There were refs and umpires to enforce rules, such as dribbling the ball in basketball or being offside in hockey. The game wass itself nothing other than the set of rules t6hat were set up to con duct the game, some of the games so surprisingly deep that like baseball the game became an obsession even if, after all, all that happened was that one team won while the other lost, in a game or a season, and that was that, no consequences otherwise except to the spirits of the fans. People come to watch the Cubs even if they lose.These rules are often detailed but arbitrary, somehow ninety yards between the bases just right or just customary and so teams deal with those circumstances so as, for example, to make squeeze plays possible. Simmel noted that elections were decided for most elections by majority vote and that that was arbitrary because it did not represent a consensus but only the dividing line between victory or defeat. It could well be that nations and bodies can decide for supermajorities or allow for filibusters to settle divergent views. A majority is a custom as is the peaceful succession of power, which Trump unprecedentedly challenges, and that game had previously provided that next time out the losing party might win, just as in sporting games, where there is always next year.
Donald Trump is very good at breaking the rules to do with an election without quite announcing that. His vagueness in language, either done with slyness or stupidity, serves him well. Famously, when he gave a speech at the Ellipse just before the riots at the Capital on Jan. 6th, 2021, he added on that the protesters should be peaceful, a statement he reiterated in the 2024 campaign, but he had earlier said the protesters should be “strong” so as to rectify democracy. What did “strong” mean other than attack the Capitol? He didn’t advocate violence but that could be inferred, the term “strong” left dangling. Certainly the rioters got the idea to go ahead. But he could say it wasn’t his fault he was misinterpreted, though his unspoken intentions were clear in that when he finally, three hours after it began, he said he loved these people when he called the rioters off and they complied. Similarly, a call to lock Hillary up can be treated as an exaggeration or a joke even if people infer that Hillary should really be locked up. Similarly a claim that the immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating the cats and dogs can be thought as hyperbole rather than fact as J. D. Vance said that the image captured the danger of immigrant hordes. Expect that Trump’s second term will just slightly rhetorically lessen the impact of massive deportation by claiming like J. D. Vance that it is only starters rather than the start of the whole thing as far as they can get. Woe is me and woe to all of us because there has never been a President who offers to be destructive rather than follow the role of being steward to the nation and making it a little bit better than he left it. That’s why I watch reruns of “The West Wing”.