Popular fiction romanticizes the medieval era as a time of noble knights, wise kings and chivalry. The unromantic truth is that it was a bloody and brutal age, marked by perpetual war and conflict. Monarchy bears the blame for that.
It’s not just that individual kings were cruel, arrogant and power-hungry, although they were. Rather, it’s that monarchy has a built-in incentive for violence.
Monarchy is a might-makes-right system with no rules, no laws, no checks or balances. Whoever could seize the throne by force became the next absolute ruler. This means that, whenever a king died, there was a succession crisis. Unless there was an heir ready to take over (and sometimes even then), a violent free-for-all ensued. Every powerful person who coveted the throne battled it out to decide who’d be the next king. For centuries, these wars of succession were an almost constant feature of life.
Democracy has a better solution to the problem of succession. When the previous leader’s term is over, the country holds an election to choose the next one, and – in theory – everyone respects the outcome.
However, democracy has an inherent weakness. It depends on the consent of the people, so it can only survive if each generation values it and makes a choice to renew it. If the people no longer care about democracy, it can degenerate into autocracy, and once it’s gone, it’s very hard to get back.
That’s the situation we’re in.
In 2024, Americans had a choice between two candidates for president. One was an ordinary, decent, well-qualified politician who would have continued the mostly progressive policies of the Biden administration. The other was the Platonic ideal of an unfit candidate: a convicted felon, a sexual predator, a tax cheat, a lover of dictators, a friend to conspiracy theorists, openly racist and misogynist, intentionally cruel, wildly ignorant and profoundly incompetent. Worst of all, when he lost the last election, he tried to steal it and then, when that failed, triggered a violent insurrection against the rightful government. It was a disgraceful first in American history, a true example of an enemy within.
We know who the voters chose.
And it was the voters’ choice, loath as I am to admit it. If he had lost the popular vote but won the electoral college (again) – or, worse, if he’d lost the election but had it stolen for him by red-state legislators or his judicial toadies – that would be one thing. That scenario would have been another illustration of the dysfunctional, broken-as-designed American system, which allows candidates to win with only a minority of the total votes cast. It would be an occasion for rage and despair, to be sure, but it wouldn’t say anything about the actual views of the public.
But, like I said, that’s not what happened. The fact that he won the popular vote is a different scenario altogether. This time, unlike in 2016, it can’t be blamed on the founding fathers’ mistakes. The American people saw him for who he is and freely handed power back to him.
What should we do when voters democratically elect an enemy of democracy?
Your response to this question should depend on your theory about why this happened. Was it out of ignorance – votes cast by people who somehow didn’t know or didn’t understand the threat he poses, or were unaware of what his policies actually were? Or was it out of malice – votes cast by people who know perfectly well that he stands for fascism and autocracy, and supported him because that’s what they want?
(As an important footnote, you can say that Trump didn’t win the election so much as Harris lost it. He got slightly more votes than in 2020, while she got dramatically less than Biden. Republicans voted like they usually do, while Democrats stayed home. But if you confine yourself to asking about the preferences of Democratic voters and why they didn’t show up, it’s the same core issue. Was it out of apathy and ignorance, or were they genuinely torn about which candidate was better?)
Which of these two explanations you believe will dictate your conclusion about what we should do now. If people were ignorant or deceived, that means our situation is fixable. It’s discouraging, to be sure, but it means the American republic isn’t beyond saving. With better education, with a stronger ecosystem of progressive media, and with more of an effort to get the word out, there’s still a chance of turning the ship around.
On the other hand, if people have given up on democracy and want a strongman to rule them and punish their enemies… that would be a more dire scenario. That’s not a mistaken impression of facts, but a deep dissonance of values. If that’s what happened, then the American experiment may truly have run its course and is now drawing to an end.
When he was asked what the Constitutional Convention had created, Benjamin Franklin famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Those words have never been so bleakly relevant. If we ultimately can’t keep it, it won’t be because we were conquered or overthrown by an external enemy. It will be because we did it to ourselves.
… he won the popular vote …
By (at present, incomplete count) 49.9%.
No discussion of 2024 should omit that.
Semantics, I’m afraid. Even if he got less than an absolute majority of all votes cast, he would have won a national popular vote that used a first-past-the-post system.
I think this is a very complex topic and can’t be broken down to a single reason. It must be remembered that the vote count shows Trump’s vote was not strong either. This wasn’t a popular surge for Trump. It was more people that would have voted Democrat staying home.
Why did they stay home? Lots of reasons, there is a laundry list from ignorance and apathy to dislike of Harris and Democratic party policy. Can it be fixed? Some yes and some no. What I have not seen is a reasonable analysis of the importance of the various factors that would enable the Democrats to prioritize them.
I wish it was out of ignorance, but Trump is a known quantity to everyone now. That is mostly why I see this vote as primarily a moral one.
Now I did see a lot of self-deception going on by people who are easily manipulated. Based on that, my only solution is to try to keep our democracy alive while pushing critical thinking hard in public education. If we do that for a couple generations, I think we would have better citizens that do not fall so easily for con artist tricks and also understand morality better.
To be fair, monarchs at least had the advantage of being tied to their dynasties/kingdoms, so that they couldn’t just resign in scandal and let their successors take the blame (like Dodgy Dave back in 2016); for them it was a family heirloom, though most used it poorly. As for why the popular vote chose Trump, I have heard rumors of tampering with Starlink voting machines (those produced by Elon Musk), but it would seem the truth is far simpler; being that Democrats failed to come out in the numbers needed to thwart the will a highly dysfunctional electorate. But king or president, a government only has power when it is obeyed, and beyond resistance it still may be prudent to simply walk a way: not taxes from blue regions (laundering may be necessary), no economic contributions from businesses, buying foreign over American whenever possible and resisting every single step that the new administration takes. It is not fair that the productives of this nation==workers, artists, and academic commenters suffer through the consequences of a dictatorship they did not choose; but if the mind of the nation is removed along with its hands, red America will have nothing to offer us in terms of negotiations or resources and will have to kowtow to a total dismantling of their policies. If not, our interests will simply do business abroad with similar nations for our needs to be met; I don’t mind paying a few extra dollars for honest goods.
He did actually lose the popular vote, I think? The tallies are showing it now. Of course, the Slaveholders^W Electoral College makes that irrelevant, as it did so many other times…
Kamala Harris’s campaign was better in some ways than Donald Trump’s — more people showing up at her rallies, more door knocking, etc. But it failed to live up to its initial promise, and it failed to campaign on Democratic successes in Tim Walz’s state and elsewhere, successes like free school lunches. Tim Walz was great at first, like calling Republicans weird, but the party then shifted to featuring Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, without even appealing to Republicans who may be tired of all the weirdos and freaks in their party. Trying to get the Arab vote by sending Ritchie Torres D-AIPAC to Detroit?
Donald Trump just plain lied, like disavowing Project 2025, only for it to return after he was elected. He also said that he would not support a national abortion ban.
There were also a lot of ads about how the Democrats want to trans your kids.
Downballot Democrats often did much better than Donald Trump, and some of them survived in states that voted for Trump.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed that she is great leader by asking her Instagram followers if any of them voted for both her and Donald Trump, and if so, why.
A common answer were that both AOC and DT came from outside the establishments of their respective political parties, that they are anti-establishment politicians.
That is likely part of the reason for DT’s win more generally — incumbents have fared poorly in recent elections elsewhere in the world.
We can approach the issue of the best forms of governance in an evidence-based way, by looking at what does best. One can use ratings from the likes of Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Varieties of Democracy, … Comparing to systems of government, one finds:
– Parliamentary system: the executive department is run out of the legislature
– Single chamber or one dominant one (UK House of Commons vs. House of Lords)
– Election by proportional representation
– An independent executive that does not do very much, if it is present
The US loses in all four. In fact, it’s one of the best countries with a strong independent president, a presidential system. Some countries like France, use a hybrid system, a semi-presidential system, and France is one of the best with this system.
Notice how it’s the legislature that is the dominant one, and other research, by Steven Fish et al. also has this conclusion. Using a Parliamentary Powers Index, they discover that higher-quality democracy is correlated with legislatures having more powers. The US Congress is one of the stronger legislatures, but not as strong as some other high scorers’ ones.
I hope everyone who either sat it out or voted for Trump, not because they are MAGA cultists but because the Dem ticket wasn’t progressive enough enjoy living in a fascist country.
Yeah, I blame apathetic Democrats possibly even more. I don’t expect fascists to not be fascists. But the people who lived through four years of Trump, who voted against him in 2020 because they saw for themselves that he was a threat, and then decided to sit this one out… this is their fault too.
It must be noted that republics larger than a city-state were very rare before recent centuries. There were some, but they tended to become monarchies. The ancient Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, a monarchy in all but name, and the position of stadtholder in the Dutch Republic became hereditary.
Over the last 2 1/2 centuries, however, monarchy has gone into steep decline. The beginning of the end was George Washington refusing to make himself king, though that did not have much impact at the time. The French Revolution, however, gave republicanism a bad name with its strife and mass executions, and many Europeans decided that they’d prefer monarchs to risking their heads being sliced off. But European nations’ legislatures gradually did more and more of the work of governing, until the remaining European monarchs are mostly monarques fainéants, do-nothing monarchs. France itself alternated between monarchy and republicanism a few times before settling on the latter.
The Great War, as World War I was called back then, ended the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, the Romanovs of Russia, and the Osmans of the Ottoman Empire. Before that war, most European nation builders wanted monarchs for their nations, and after that war, there were no new monarchies. World War II ended even more monarchies.
The US is the first European colony to decolonize, and half a century later, Latin America followed, with only Brazil becoming a monarchy. But it also eventually became a republic. Most of the decolonized nations of the 20th cy. also became republics.
Why did monarchy last so long then fall precipitously? Here’s a theory: the much-improved long-distance communication of recent centuries Collective decision-making has the problem of communication between the decision-makers, and until recent centuries, that was only feasible inside of cities. Nowadays, it is feasible across continents.
Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type – John Gerring, Tore Wig, Wouter Veenendaal, Daniel Weitzel, Jan Teorell, Kyosuke Kikuta, 2021
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0010414020938090
(PDF)
https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/84589/Monarchy_43_full%20app%20&%20text_anon.pdf?sequence=5
You omit a critical third option – they weren’t apathetic, they weren’t ignorant, and they weren’t torn about which part to vote for. They just weren’t going to vote for a woman. By all means, tell me that wasn’t a factor.
Dem voters have shown, twice, that they WILL turn out in winning numbers to vote for a person of colour. They’ve shown, twice, that they will NOT turn out in winning numbers to vote for a woman when the alternative is widely recognised to be a fascist moron. It remains to be seen what lesson the party will learn from this.
It rankles to think that if the Dems want power, then the data suggests that fielding a man as the candidate is a preferable strategy. The progressive mind rebels against this idea for obvious reasons. However, you have to ask the question: do you want to be “right”, or do you want to win? I’ve said many times, with credit and apologies to Flavia Dzodan: my left-wing principles will be in power, or they will be bullshit. Or if you prefer a more geek reference, change the Slartibartfast quote: “I’d far rather be in power than right”. “And are you?” “What?” “In power?” “No. That’s where it all falls down of course.” Moral purity is a luxury.
Obviously there are many, many factors at stake – the gender of the candidates would have been far from the only factor causing the incumbent Dems to lose so comprehensively to such a bad opposition candidate. But I don’t think you can reasonably claim that the fact Harris is a woman was NOT a fairly large factor. This implies a deep misogyny in even those people inclined to vote for the party most of the rest of the world laughs when they hear describes as the “left-wing” one. It would be nice if that misogyny could be addressed… but you have to ask yourself, after two failed attempts to put a woman into the White House, whether they intend to keep banging their heads against that particular brick wall from a position of failure, or whether the sensible thing to do is aim to win FIRST, then try to address the problem from a position of power. Because I can’t imagine telling me with a straight face that it’s not a big problem.
I’ll close with a brief description of a cartoon in this week’s “Private Eye”, the UK satirical magazine. “Culture Bores”, by “Grizelda”, has a three-panel cartoon of a woman in a “I {heart} Kamala shirt addressing a crowd (some apparently wearing MAGA hats) thus:
“In the aftermath of the US election, Democrats need to reach out to Trump voters.”
“We need to ask you where we went wrong?”
“And why you stupid racist bigots voted for that fascist!?”
I’d like to argue with this, but I can’t.
I don’t want to say the solution is for the Democrats to never run a female candidate for president again. That would be horrifically unjust. But it seems clear that there’s some number of voters who will support progressive policies only as long as a man’s face is on the package, and preferably a white man. I don’t know what to do about that.
To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting “never again” for a female candidate. Just… not any time soon. Because if we’re honest, we know the US public is not going to be ready for a woman candidate – at least not one from the left – any time soon.
It’s a sad fact that here in the UK, the left has consistently been led by white men, apart from a couple of caretaker interim leaders. The right, meanwhile, has produced the first Jew, the first woman, the second woman, the THIRD woman*, and the first Asian Prime Minister (and the first pig fucker, but moving on…). Are you ready for President Gabbard? President Taylor Greene?
*comfortably the worst PM in history, against stiff competition from her immediate predecessors, and that judgement has NOTHING to do with her gender.