Postdiluvian Postmortem
I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
Donald Trump (2023 speech)
It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t even been a week since the election. I guess gnashing of teeth really slows down the passage of time. There have been plenty of analyses done already, and they will continue on as the Dems decide what to do over the next few months and years. Those evaluations are certainly important (Was it sexism? Was it racism? Is identity politics dead? Was it the Joe Rogan effect? Did Liz Cheney sink the ship?), I’ll leave all those granular issues aside for now, to focus on just a couple key points that have seemed persuasive to me. And then we’ll put the Trump victory in context, as it relates to the overall them of this blog: can we transition to a different way of life that begins to heal the damage done by our current civilizational format and by our species in general?
The Election — What Happened?
Even for those in the liberal media bubble, Trump’s win should not have come as a big surprise. After her initial poll bumps, Harris’s numbers plateaued and then started to erode. She was really caught in an impossible position. She had to distance herself from Biden somewhat, but not too much, as she had to run like an incumbent, touting her and Biden’s record (which was not insignificant). Did she run a perfect campaign, as many are saying? No. The decision to go after moderate Republicans instead of young males (white, black, and latino) did not work. Dodging the bro-podcasts was a mistake (Trump did them all). And relying on pro-choice sentiment to carry over into the presidential race turned out to not be a slam-dunk, as many women rejected state abortion bans but still voted for Trump.
But that all may be moot, due to a couple salient numbers. And even if the Dems had held some open primaries to find a different candidate, that also could have been for naught. Why? First, because of the approval rating for Biden. Of all the numbers swirling around, the single best predictor of presidential elections has been the approval rating of the incumbent. When that is high, the incumbent or the candidate of the same party wins. When it is low, they lose. Voters are simply not that complicated. If they don’t like what’s going on, they boot the bums out. Biden’s latest approval rating was 41%. Just not good enough to allow his successor to win. Even though Harris significantly outperformed that 41% (it looks like she’ll end up with about 48% of the vote), it was just too big a hill to climb. If the Dems had picked someone “better” than Harris, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Incumbent approval rating is just that solid of a predictor.
As to why Biden’s approval rating was so low, you just have to look at the other big explanatory variable for the election: how is the economy doing? Exit polling showed that 68% of voters thought the economy was in bad shape; and 70% of that group went with Trump. That’s pretty much the ballgame right there. This matches all the pre-election polling where Trump scored higher than Harris on all questions surrounding the economy. As to whether this perception amongst voters of a bad economy is accurate, or if their judgment of Trump’s proficiency in those matters is warranted, it really doesn’t matter. That’s how people feel. Despite establishment pundits trying to convince people that the economy was awesome, because of the booming stock market, declining inflation, and low unemployment, regular people felt differently. And while Trump’s main economic policy proposals, mass deportation, deregulation, and heavy import tariffs, will probably result in worse outcomes for regular people, at least he was feeling their pain. As one writer put it: “If you’re drowning, and one person is throwing you a rubber ducky, and the other person is telling you that you’re actually standing on dry land, you’re gonna take the rubber ducky, even though you know it likely won’t help you very much.”
One final note on the election. Trump is on track to basically get exactly what he got in 2020, around 74 million votes. So he didn’t actually win over more voters. The difference was in Harris’s numbers. She is on track (as of today, Nov 9) to get around 70 million votes, compared to the hefty 81 million that Biden got. So for whatever reason, people just did not turn out for her. Would they have turned out for any Democrat, considering the numbers above? I doubt it. As many have noted, the US is just the latest advanced country to kick out the incumbents who were in charge during the pandemic. It is a global pattern, and Harris couldn’t buck it.
Trump 2.0 — What Comes Next?
A couple posts ago, I outlined what I think another Trump term would look like. I won’t rehash that all here. You can check that out at your leisure. But there is one new wrinkle, and that comes from Trump winning the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. His unquestionable mandate, especially if the GOP ends up winning the House, makes it very difficult for him to continue to blame the Dems, the “enemy within,” for everything. He is now going to have to put up or shut up (well, we know he’ll never do the latter, but you get the gist). He has promised a laundry list of huge changes, and unlike his first term, he can’t coast by on the inherited Obama economy, satisfying his base with a travel ban and some pig jokes about liberal starlets. In other words, in the time between the Insurrection and this election, Trump has magnified and amplified the polarized demonization of immigrants and libs to epic proportions, and his supporters are going to want big time delivery of the goods. He promised to end the Ukraine and Gaza situations on Day One. He has promised rapid deportation of millions of people, which will require unbelievable amounts of cash, personnel and infrastructure. And then there’s the tariffs, the deregulation, the tax cuts, etc.
I’m convinced that Trump knows that all this stuff will be impossible to pull off, and any pieces that he does manage to implement will blow huge holes in the economy, with tax revenue plummeting and inflation being pushed much higher as businesses pass on tariff costs to consumers, and all the sectors reliant on immigrant labor go bankrupt from lack of workers. I think part of him is hoping that his base will be satisfied with just the retribution part of his agenda: freeing the insurrectionists, going after the Bidens and any other Dems who crossed him, shutting down the legal proceedings against him, etc. While the die-hard culture warriors will be satisfied with that lib payback, the millions of pragmatists who voted for him will want fast delivery of those big economic promises: deportation, tariffs, and tax cuts, all of which will actually make things worse economically.
So Trump will be in a bind. He’ll want to just stay in campaign mode, attacking the libs and telling lies about everything under the sun (I’m sure there will be a lot of tweets about his inauguration crowd size). But this mandate thing will be a heavy cross to bear, and he’ll actually have to deliver on the stuff that he’s been promising. Don’t be surprised if that incumbent approval pendulum swings back around in 2026 and 2028, if things continue to deteriorate. If you play-act as the savior, you better bring some divine deliverance. I doubt that’s coming.
The Bigger Picture — We Still Have to Save the World
So how does the election, and the future of our political parties, intersect with our larger economic, ecological, and social problems? Here’s a quick rundown of the basic ideas in this blog.
The planet is basically in a polycrisis. Every natural support system is in decline, and most of that decline is steep (and steepening). Our impact on the planet, as a species, is just too big. There’s too many of us, and our current civilization and technologies are too damaging. We need to start massively and rapidly reducing our impact on the planet. Everything needs to contract. Our population needs to decline. Our economies need to shrink. Our technologies need to be rethought and reengineered, to allow the planet to start healing itself. A lot of things need to stop happening, and a bunch of new things need to start happening.
Needless to say, all of this sounds ridiculous, and is basically a nonstarter in our current system. Our global and national economies operate on the concept of unending growth. Contraction is not an option. Reducing anything, in an economic sense, means stagnation, recession, depression, and collapse. If there’s one thing that all countries and political parties agree on, it’s that growth is good. We need more jobs, more consumption, more GDP, more breakthroughs, more products, more of everything.
This massive clash, between the planet that needs human impact to shrink rapidly, and our economies that need endless growth, is the defining story of our time, and perhaps of our species. We don’t need a new Golden Age. We don’t need to go to Mars. We don’t need to make America Great Again. We don’t need full employment, or a Green New Deal, or a magic new energy source that will power a billion new cars. We need to find a mechanism for swift and widespread contraction, one that can translate across countries and cultures, allowing us to perform the only task left worth doing: saving the planet and ourselves.
This mechanism for contraction will not come from above, either nationally or internationally. In our current configuration of consumer-industrial capitalism, governments of all stripes have been captured by global plutocrats, creating a kind of hermetically-sealed structure of hyper-concentrated wealth and power. That system is basically impenetrable to reform from within, so it will continue to churn out the toxic byproduct of inequality, which is what drives the intense cultural and political polarization we have today.
But what the rise of Trumpist populism demonstrates, especially after the sweeping victory this week, is that the system is vulnerable from below. The fact that tens of millions of people voted for someone they find personally repugnant (many of his supporters openly admit that he is not a good person, but is a good weapon against the elite) is an indication that people have reached the breaking point, and are no longer willing to be exploited by the system. There is potential there for leveraging this discontent into a truly revolutionary project, one that improves people’s lives without being tethered to endless economic growth.
Of course, Trumpism itself will not be able to deliver any meaningful change for people, and as the gild comes off the lily in the next year or two, space will be opened up for other radical changes and challenges to the system. I think that those changes should center around Bigger Home Bases, Universal Basic Income, and Modern Money Theory. And I think that the catalyst for these changes will have to come from a non-partisan, non-political project, generating popular support that will only then be adopted later by a political party. I highly doubt that this would be the Democratic party, but certainly the Forward or Green parties would be good candidates to pick up the reins and push the project into the national discussion.
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on November 9, 2024.
