Linked List: November 6, 2024

Wednesday, 6 November 2024

Taegan Goddard, Political Wire:

After last night, it became clear it was a mistake to dismiss Trump’s true political strength. He will win the 2024 election with at least 51% of the popular vote.

His win will not be the result of a constitutional quirk. It was not even the result of a bad campaign by Kamala Harris. His victory was so broad based I’m not sure any Democrat could have beaten him last night.

There’s a brutal clarity in this result.

The majority of Americans are not concerned with Trump’s blatant racism or sexism. They are not concerned with his vows of retribution on his political enemies. They are not concerned with warnings of “fascism” by his former top aides. They are not concerned with his extensive criminal and fraudulent behavior.

If there’s a takeaway from this election, it’s that this is who we are.

Not all of us, to be sure. But it makes clear what the rest of us are up against.

I take some small solace at the moment in Trump’s victory being the clear democratic result. Republicans just fucking won. No mistakes on Harris’s side. There’s no Comey letter. No hanging chads. No margin within the range of woulda-coulda-shoulda recriminations. Just a clear electoral result.

I realized this year — or perhaps over the last four years — that for me, belief in the merits of democracy is quasi-religious. It’s more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamental belief. I have faith in democracy, and part of that is accepting the results of any fair and free election as the will of the electorate — similar, I think, to how actually religious people have faith that unspeakable tragedies can somehow be the will of a just and righteous deity. Through that prism, and with the genuine shock of 2016 giving me a brace, I can accept this. But because of that prism, I will never forgive or forget Trump’s shameful desecration of our democratic ideals in 2020. His winning in 2016 and again now are awful events. But his attempt to overturn the 2020 election — ham-fisted, idiotic, and failed though it thankfully was — was and will always be worse.

‘In Defeat: Defiance’ ★

Bill Kristol, at The Bulwark:

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything — after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal — the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong. [...]

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

‘Trump Has Won, but Democracy Is Not Over’ ★

Tom Nichols, for The Atlantic:

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states — at least those in the union that will still care about democracy — have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now — not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. [...]

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

I wrote last night, “Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.” Referring, of course, to watching the results come in on election night in 2016. Now the day after, I still sense some of the same similarities to 2016, but I more feel the differences. I was braced for this result, this time. I wasn’t in 2016. Trump winning in 2016 was like a trapdoor we didn’t even know existed opening suddenly under our feet. But once the unimaginable happens, it’s no longer unimaginable that it might happen again. I was optimistic about this election. But polls are polls, and I knew my optimism was based on some degree of faith that the polls were wrong. I still think, now, that there were good reasons to suspect the polls might be underestimating Harris’s and down-ticket Democrats’ chances. But after 2016, I knew the polls showing Trump’s resiliency could be right.

Trump’s first term in office was disastrous on numerous fronts, and of the few things I feel certain about right now, one of them is that his second will be worse. This is going to be bad. But we shouldn’t be concussed like we were in 2016. This was not unimaginable. We knew this might be the result. And we know how we got through it last time: by going through it, with eyes open, resistance strong, and, as Nichols exhorts, shoulders squared. Truth and justice are the American way. The fight goes on.

Overnight Status Check ★

Josh Marshall, signing off for the night:

If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.

Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.