Sorting through the noise to try and understand what just happened

After sitting in my discomfort for a few days, I'm ready to try to understand WTH happened in this election. There are an awful lot of bad takes out there attempting to find fault with VP Harris, President Biden, or Democrats in general. But they're all impossible to square with the fact that, no matter their shortcomings, a little more than half of voters supported a delusional, narcissistic bully who has been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and tried to overturn an election.

So here's the take that makes the most sense to me: 

About a month ago I wrote that, when it came to the presidential election, it was all about the lies and the way Trump/Vance used them to create an alternative reality. As it turns out, the lies worked. One of the best ways to document that came from a Reuters/Ipsos poll that was conducted just prior to the election.

What we see is that the more voters believed Trump's lies about crime, the economy, and immigration, the more likely they were to vote for him. Those who believed the truth swung heavily in Harris's direction. 

We're also getting a lot of bad takes on who those lies appealed to. Philip Bump did a good job of debunking all of that nonsense. The first thing to note is that Trump received about the same number of votes that he did in 2020 (it's just that Harris got fewer than Biden). So if we look at the demographics of Trump voters, "his voting base [in 2024] was older, wealthier and about equally White to what it was in 2020."

For example, we're hearing a lot of talk about how Trump won over Hispanics and African Americans in 2024. But here's what that actually looked like:

To all of those who are suggesting that this election was all about populism and support from working class folks, the truth is that Trump's big gains were actually among the wealthy.

What this kind of information tells us is that we not only need to combat the lies from right wing media, we're also being fed a lot of junk information from mainstream media and pundits. So chose your sources wisely.

Over the last few days I've been noting who I will pay attention to and who I'm going to ignore. On the former category, I've been significantly impressed with Rebecca Solnit. Here are a few gems from her latest column at The Guardian. 

I’m wary about anger – as George Orwell once observed, it’s easily redirected, like the flame of a blowlamp, and it has been in this election as people whose own lives were thwarted economically and otherwise got on board with the scapegoating of immigrants. So it’s something to be careful with. Even so, “rage is a form of prayer too,” as Reverend Dr. Renita J. Weems declared after this terrible US election.

I suspect she means that behind that rage is care, and this is something I have found secular activists often forget – you are angry the children are being bombed or the forest is being cleared because you care about them, so it’s not the feelings about the forces of destruction that is primary. It’s the love, and not losing sight of that is crucial...

Not being them and not being like them is the first job, not just as negatives but as an embrace of the ideals of love, kindness, open-mindedness, the ability to engage with uncertainty and ambiguity, inclusiveness...

There are other kinds of resistance that mean making your own life and your own mind an independent republic in which the pursuit of truth, human rights, kindness and empathy, the preservation of history and memory...This does not overthrow the regime, but it does mean being someone who has not been conquered by it, and it invites others who have not been or who can throw off the shackles to join you...

We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving. Let Julian Aguon have the last word: “No offering is too small. No stone unneeded … All of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”

Solnit's words remind me of a song Garth Brooks wrote after the Oklahoma bombing titled "The Change." It's going to be my anthem for a while.

I've also been extremely impressed with the analysis provided by historian Heather Cox Richardson. She was interviewed by Jon Stewart a couple of days ago on his podcast. It is a little over an hour long and I know most people won't take the time to listen to the whole thing. But she's absolutely brilliant (Stewart...not so much). So I definitely recommend paying attention to her - no one does a better job of describing what just happened. 

Doug Muder has always demonstrated a deep understanding of this political era and recently wrote a post titled, "My Way-Too-Soon Election Response" over at his blog The Weekly Sift.

Going forward, I'll be paying a lot of attention to Timothy Snyder, who literally wrote the book on fascism. His most recent column at the New Yorker is titled, "What Does it Mean that Donald Trump Is a Fascist."

To maintain my sanity in the midst of the chaos that is about to come, those are just a few of the people I'll be listening to. 

On a final (somewhat related) note, I'd just like to share this little nugget to help explain why Christian nationalists are so amenable to the alternate reality created by Trump's lies.