Election 2024: The Aftermath
Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future…Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.
Susan Griffin
As we come down the home stretch of this eternal and exhausting election “season” (not sure it can be called a season if it stretches out for years at a time), we are faced with one incontrovertible fact: someone will (eventually) lose, and roughly half the electorate will be pissed off. But what happens after that? Despite apocalyptic proclamations from each side, there likely won’t be a tearing asunder of the heavens, and Jesus is probably not riding down on a thundercloud to smite the evildoers and rescue the virtuous.
So what will actually happen with regular people and their everyday lives? How will each administration tackle the challenges of our unravelling world, and will either of those approaches actually bend the arc on the most serious problems we’re facing? If relief isn’t coming via the well-worn pathways of peak polarization, is there any alternative that could break this dualistic demonization cycle and push us in a different direction, one where we’re not forever aligned against our fellow citizens in a cultural death match?
Scenario 1: Harris Wins
If Kamala Harris completes her meteoric rise to power and pulls the upset, we’ll likely be in a strange situation, where, on the one hand, there will be historic celebrations across the country, with the US finally joining the modern world and electing a woman as leader. But amidst the jubilation of tens of millions at this epochal achievement, Trump supporters, at the same time, will almost certainly be yelling and screaming again about voter fraud, stolen elections, Democratic chicanery and the rest of the usual right-wing playbook. The celebrations of Harris supporters will be like nails on a chalkboard for the MAGA crowd, and the polarizing wedge will be driven deeper and the chasm will be wider.
The best thing to hope for in a Harris win is that it be convincing and irrefutable, and also that election officials in tight states keep their nerve again and do the right thing by resisting conservative intimidation and certifying legitimate results. A super-tight election with razor-thin margins in swing states will be a nightmare, because that would play into the Trump strategy of creating chaos around key districts and pushing things to the courts, where Orange Julius Caesar has the ultimate home court advantage in the Supreme Court.
Regardless of the size of a Harris victory, there will certainly be protests of some type by the MAGA crowd. But I really don’t see that amounting to much in the long run. Trump doesn’t have the advantage of being the sitting president this time around, and you can bet your last dollar that the Biden administration will have a massive security presence in Washington from election day through inauguration day. Without the optics of Trump as a sitting president under siege, there is really nothing for mass MAGA protests to coil around for an extended period of time. I can’t see Trump staying at the DC Hilton for weeks on end over the winter, doing press conferences on the street in front of the White House or Congress, trying to foment another insurrection from outside the halls of power. It just won’t work, and The Donald will more likely just retreat to Mara Lago and try to cut a deal with Harris to drop some of the legal cases against him. And he’ll have to lean hard into new money-making ventures, likely through the huckster marketplace of MAGA merch and other anti-lib commodity bazaars.
The Harris administration itself would likely be Democratic business-as-usual. A lot would depend on how the Congress shakes out. If she has a full GOP or split Congress, expect the normal gridlock, with Republicans taking an obstructionist approach to everything, to ensure that Harris gets no victories. The GOP will commit fully to making Harris a one-termer. Trump’s scuttling of the immigration bill will be the model GOP tactic, and the Dems should call the obstruction out in real time, making clear to the American people who is stalling things.
If Harris has a fully Democratic Congress, then the game is changed. She would be able to push through a lot of agenda items, with immigration, enhanced tax credits, homeowner aid, and other economic help being the first wave of action. I have no idea how Harris would handle the escalating warfare and genocide in the Middle East, or how she would approach the Russia-Ukraine war. If she tacks to the same course as the Biden administration, these situations could continue to fester and spread. But she likely has some new ideas of her own, and could try to put a stamp on her presidency from the start by changing up the strategy.
A Harris win would have far-reaching consequences for the GOP, the extent of which could vary, depending on the size of the margin and the outcome in Congress. But either way, if he is true to his word (i t’s actually hard to type that phrase, as it’s so ridiculous on its face), Trump will not run again. So the GOP would be looking at a post-Trump world. He would, of course, still try to control everything, but I can’t see him being interested in being just a kingmaker and not a king. And how long would conservative media still be able to make money off of giving Trump center stage ad nauseum, after his political career is essentially over? Without the impending promise/threat of another term in office, Trump would just be a two-time loser (three-time, looking at the popular vote), another disgruntled old white guy growing more demented by the day in his ramblings. And that’s if he stays out of jail.
So the Republicans would need to start remaking itself for a post-Trump future. GOP leadership is almost certainly terrified at this prospect, as Trump is really a completely unique phenomenon, a lightning-strike combination of telegenic charisma, shameless self-aggrandizement, brilliant media instincts, and the lifetime spotlight that comes with growing up as a millionaire playboy in New York City. This is an impossible persona to replicate. Can you see any of the baby Trumps mobilizing the MAGA base like Trump? Tucker Carlson? JD Vance? Ron DeSantis?
It is common in liberal circles to worry that the next conservative leader with fascist tendencies to come along will be much more ruthless and dedicated than Trump to the cause, and thus more dangerous. In this line of thought, the next MAGA leader will not be a narcissistic, pussy-grabbing mess, and will thus be able to fully implement the social engineering dystopia of Project 2025 and its ilk. I understand the sentiment, but I think it actually underestimates how powerfully unique Trump’s hold over the disparate elements of his coalition are. Without his specific personal magnetism, I think there is a good chance that the MAGA movement falls apart, and sends the GOP back to the drawing board. After all, the master idea that currently animates the Republican party is rage over rural decline. All the other stuff that has been cobbled together to form the contemporary GOP — white supremacy, Christian nationalism, anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-vax, anti-science — it all revolves around the central geographic axis of rural depopulation and rural economic collapse. As demographics continue to change, Republicans will have to, at some point, pivot to a strategy that actually tries to appeal to more types of people, instead of just railing against how awful everything is, especially in the cities they describe as hellholes and cesspools. Without that adjustment, the GOP will wither away.
Scenario 2: Trump Wins
I won’t spend a ton of time on this, as most of the Harris-victory section above was about Trump anyway. And there’s plenty of material out there on how horrible another Trump term will be. My best guesses are: Trump will not solve the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East quagmire on Day One, as he promises; he will not get too far in his mass-deportation scheme, due to its logistical impossibility, astronomic cost, and fundamental inefficacy; his primary economic strategies of tariffs and tax cuts will not do anything to fundamentally change the hyper-unequal state of American capitalism; and he will quickly lose interest in the revenge campaigns against his perceived oppressors. Anything that would require sustained effort, diplomacy, or policy sophistication will be abandoned rapidly by Trump, in favor of his usual self-important preening, gloating, and taunting.
Trump would likely expend most of his effort on shutting down the legal cases against him, and in reestablishing the financial gravy-train that comes with high office. Everything else he would farm out to his minions, even the retribution against his enemies. It’s important to remember that the only thing that Trump really believes in is his own ego (although psychologically, his overcompensation in that area actually demonstrates that he is profoundly lacking in self-love and genuine love of anything in general). Everything else he says — the demonizing of libs, the bald-faced lies about immigrants or the economy or crime, the proforma pandering to Christians and other salt of the earth types — those are all designed just to win the race in front of him. Once installed in office again, he would spend most of his time doing what he always does: tweeting and playing golf. In that vacuum of actual leadership, JD Vance would likely become the de facto president, a la Dick Cheney.
If Vance becomes the five-o’clock-shadow president, there could be a real push towards the Handmaid’s Tale goals of Project 2025. Unlike Trump, who disavows Project 2025 and probably doesn’t really give a crap about it anyway (see paragraph above), Vance is a semi-true believer. Even though he says that he agrees with some things and disagrees with others, Vance has close ties to the Heritage Foundation (the org that created Project 2025) and to Kevin Roberts, the prez of Heritage (Vance wrote the forward to Roberts’ book). Clocking in at 900 pages, Project 2025 is a wishlist for conservative causes, many of them draconian and nonsensical. Even with his enthusiasm for some of the policies, Vance probably wouldn’t be able to get too much passed into law, especially if Congress was all-Dem or split. But in a nutshell, Project 2025 is a anachronistic manifesto against accepting almost every aspect of our current realities: the reality of demographic change; the reality that cities actually exist and will continue to exist; the reality that rural areas have been trashed by capitalism itself, not by liberals or the deep state; the reality that awesome jobs with amazing benefits for the bulk of population are never coming back, and that’s due to the full flowering of capitalism itself; the reality that women are actually full persons with hopes and dreams that may not involve making babies; the reality that a lot of people don’t believe in God, or believe in different gods than you; the reality that some dudes like other dudes, and some ladies like other ladies, and some like both; the reality that gender is a fluid and often-confusing concept, and that everyone deserves respect for their journey; the reality that human activity is trashing the planet beyond repair. You get the picture.
The Challenge Ahead
Regardless of the outcome of the election, one thing remains certain: neither side will have a compelling and realistic plan for the future. Both of the major parties are creatures of the plutocracy, serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful, ensuring the rough continuation of the status quo. Even Trump, who his supporters revere as the ultimate outsider and middle finger to the elite, ultimately serves the interests of the plutocrats. When push comes to shove, he’s always going to embrace tax cuts and deregulation, the staples of trickle-down conservatism. The neoliberal consensus is still the controlling motif of our economic and cultural overlords, and political players from across the spectrum have to dance to that tune or pay the consequences.
In this situation, both Democrats and Republicans (Trumpers and Never-Trumpers alike) are caught in an ambivalent relationship to capitalism itself. Consumer-industrial civilization has undoubtedly delivered a lot of good stuff for many people around the world. But as this version of capitalism has unfolded, it has become increasingly clear that it is a failure in three broad areas: it is ecologically fatal, it is economically unjust, and its is psychologically catastrophic. And as the plutocrats have consolidated their stranglehold on all the organs of social, economic, and cultural transmission, alternative pathways for the future have been choked out, leaving us stuck like flies on flypaper, still able to wriggle around but not going anywhere, and ultimately fated for death.
The winner of the 2024 election will not deliver us from evil, as the controlling visions of the future for each side are steeped in reality-denial and fantasy, which leaves us all ripe for profiteering and exploitation by the Polarization Industrial Complex. The system built up by the plutocracy is virtually hermetically-sealed, so no real help is coming from inside that system. We’re operating in a Table Scraps society, a Lean Six Sigma entity that delivers the bare minimum to the stakeholders while showering the ownership class with ever-mounting rewards. This system is ultimately unsustainable, and like any falling body, appears to be flying until it hits the ground.
So saving ourselves, the planet, and the future, will involve exogenous change. See older posts on this blog to get a sense of where this external change might come from.
Next time, we’ll revisit political polarization, to remind ourselves where it comes from and what functions it serves in our culture, economy, and political sphere.
(Cover Image: “The Ninth Wave”, by Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850)
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on October 13, 2024.
