GHOST DANCES? "Orange man bad" may not be enough!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 2024

So said a trio of sages: Greetings from Yugoslavia! In slightly overstated fashion, Peter Baker describes the two-nation world we ourselves have been writing about.

From today's New York Times:

BAKER (1/26/24): [T]he general election matchup that seems likely after this week’s New Hampshire primary represents more than the first-in-a-century contest between two men who have both lived in the White House. It represents the clash of two presidents of profoundly different countries, the president of Blue America versus the president of Red America.

[...]

“Today, when we think about America, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of red and blue people,” Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, wrote in an essay last month. “But America has never been one nation. We are a federated republic of two nations: Red Nation and Blue Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

Pordhorzer's portrait is overstated; in reality, his statement is a metaphor. As for Baker's longer portrait, it articulates the well understood reality of our floundering nation's growing tribal division. 

This year's election will be fought within that semi-federation. In the past few weeks, three (or five?) anti-Trumpers have offered advice to our own blue tribe about the best ways to proceed at this point. 

Presumably, no perfect advice is available from this triumverate. In some ways, the three major anti-Trumpers agree with one another. In some ways, their portraits of the economic lay of the land may perhaps seem to differ.

Some of the sages' advice concerns the short run—the attempt to defeat Trump this year. Some of their advice would serve blue tribe and American interests on a much longer time frame, moving forward into an age when the current candidates no longer define the terrain.

Of the three (or five) sages we have in mind, we'd direct you first to Anand Giridharadas, an MSNBC political analyst who we'd describe as a progressive. In his most recent appearance on Morning Joe, he advocated for the creation of "a pro-democracy movement" on the part of the Democratic Party and the left—a multi-faceted movement which would be built around the working class more than around the current unproductive academy.

In Giridharadas' view, the western world's center-left parties have increasingly become "academia-adjacent parties." As important as some of the prevailing debates and viewpoints are, he says that, as a result of that alignment, we're having "the wrong conversation."

In one major way, his view aligns with that of the third sage we'll cite. We strongly suggest that you watch Giridharadas on the January 18 Morning Joe—but for now, let's just hurry along.

Our second sage would be Roger Lowenstein, "a journalist and the author of Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War." In a recent guest essay for the New York Times, he described his view of Candidate Trump—but he also challenged some of the ways our blue tribe has been performing:

LOWENSTEIN (1/20/24): ...I hope [voters] take noneconomic factors into account, including Mr. Trump’s continued refusal to acknowledge his defeat in 2020, which has poisoned the public square and eroded the civic fabric supporting the country’s democracy. In a phrase, Mr. Trump is unfit for office.

In a pair of phrases, Candidate Trump "has poisoned the public square" and he's "unfit for office." Still and all, having said that, Lowenstein went on to say this:

LOWENSTEIN (continuing directly): That does not mean we should shrink from honestly assessing performance, including economic performance, under Mr. Trump as well as under Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump is so off-putting, many find it hard to evaluate him rationally, as we would anyone else. But it is right to do so, and we learn from having our eyes wide, not shut. And—something Democrats should have learned by now—condescending to Trump voters will not win many of them over.

Say what? Democrats should have learned by now that condescending to Trump voters won't win such fellow citizens over to our own side? 

We're strongly inclined to agree with that bit of advice. Accurately or otherwise, here's how Lowenstein set the economic scene at the start of his essay, headline included:

What Trump Voters Understand About the Economy

Why is Donald Trump continuing to poll so strongly with voters?

As unpalatable as a second Trump term would be, many pundits who tackle this question have ignored a striking fact: The typical household’s living standard improved during the three Trump years before the pandemic. Under President Biden, Americans have (at best) struggled to keep even with inflation.

Mr. Trump’s huge personal negatives—his meanspirited personality, his toadying to dictators and shunning of American allies and his unpardonable effort to steal an election—should more than offset his economic record. The old saw that Mussolini got the trains to run on time should not be understood as an endorsement.

But it is one thing to loathe Mr. Trump and hope for his defeat. It is another to wish away his successes or, as has become common, to ascribe his popularity to voter prejudices or weaknesses of character. The leitmotif in such arguments is that blue voters are rational political actors voting on merit while Trump is appealing primarily, if not exclusively, to irrational semi-citizens devoid of even self-interested calculation.

That might be. But it can’t be ignored that they might also have experienced the pointed rise, after adjusting for inflation, in the median household income—how the typical family lives—before the pandemic...

We can't assess the accuracy of Lowenstein's more detailed economic analysis. Just last weekend, we saw David Stockman, the old Reagan hand, savage Trump's economic performance during an hour on C-Span.

That said, is it possible? Is it possible that some of the people tilting toward Trump are something other than racists and xenophobes? Is it possible that some are responding to something aside from the pathologies we like to diagnose in our tribe's frequent deployment of vast sweeping assessments?

Is it possible that some of those voters really aren't bigots? Is it possible that most of these voters aren't?

Within our tribe, the answer is frequently no. In our view, that's a fairly obvious error—an error which has helped define the fortunes of our sliding blue tribe over the course of the past sixty years, dating back to the Vietnam era.

With this, we return to the center-right sage we've cited in the past two days. We refer to the New York Times' Bret Stephens, a classic pre-Trump conservative but also a down-the-line NeverTrumper.

As we've noted, Stephens sees Trump as a moral disgrace. That said, at one point in this week's Conversation with Gail Collins, he offered this bit of advice:

If we’re going to defeat Trump in November, we’ll have to do a lot better than to just keep repeating, “Orange man bad.” 

Memorable, if acerbic. Stephens has a more negative view of the blue tribe ethos than we do, but this is the way he started last week's stand-alone column in the Times, headline included:

The Case for Trump … by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose

Barring a political miracle or an act of God, it is overwhelmingly likely that Donald Trump will again be the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Assuming the Democratic nominee in the fall is Joe Biden, polls show Trump with a better-than-even chance of returning to the White House next year.

Lord help us. What should those of us who have consistently opposed him do?

You can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable. Too many people, especially progressives, fail to think deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal—and to do so without calling him names, or disparaging his supporters, or attributing his resurgence to nefarious foreign actors or the unfairness of the Electoral College. Since I will spend the coming year strenuously opposing his candidacy, let me here make the best case for Trump that I can.

Begin with fundamentals. Trump got three big things right—or at least more right than wrong.

Stephens claims that Trump got three things semi-right! We'll cite only one. His column continues as shown:

Arguably the single most important geopolitical fact of the century is the mass migration of people from south to north and east to west, causing tectonic demographic, cultural, economic, and ultimately political shifts. Trump understood this from the start of his presidential candidacy in 2015, the same year Europe was overwhelmed by a largely uncontrolled migration from the Middle East and Africa. As he said: “A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters!”

Many of Trump’s opponents refuse to see virtually unchecked migration as a problem for the West at all. Some of them see it as an opportunity to demonstrate their humanitarianism. Others look at it as an inexhaustible source of cheap labor. They also have the habit of denouncing those who disagree with them as racists. But enforcing control at the border—whether through a wall, a fence, or some other mechanism—isn’t racism. It’s a basic requirement of statehood and peoplehood, which any nation has an obligation to protect and cherish.

Only now, as the consequences of Biden’s lackadaisical approach to mass migration have become depressingly obvious on the sidewalks and in the shelters and public schools of liberal cities like New York and Chicago, are Trump’s opponents on this issue beginning to see the point...

The red tribe has been pushing border issues extremely hard. Until very recently, our own blue tribe was refusing to discuss the transparent craziness of much that seems to be occurring.

When Democratic mayors and governors (and constituencies) finally began to complain, our pundit tribe finally began to respond. But we've long had our heads in the sand, and we've been dancing a bit of a ghost dance.

We're inclined to disagree with certain parts of Stephens' original column. Within the context of Trump's behavior, his comments about Democratic "election denialism" strike us as borderline nuts.

That said, there is one other point Stephens makes—and here, the conservative Stephens aligns with the view of the progressive Giridharadas. In his column, he criticizes our blue tribe's increasing alignmnet with the worldviews which have emerged from our "elite universities and media:"

Trump’s detractors, including me, often argued that his demagoguery and mendacity did a lot to needlessly diminish trust in these vital institutions. But we should be more honest with ourselves and admit that those institutions did their own work in squandering, through partisanship or incompetence, the esteem in which they had once been widely held.

How so? Much of the elite media, mostly liberal, became openly partisan in the 2016 election—and, in doing so, not only failed to understand why Trump won but also probably unwittingly contributed to his victory. Academia, also mostly liberal, became increasingly illiberal—inhospitable not just to conservatives but to anyone pushing back even modestly against progressive orthodoxy. 

Especially regarding those elite universities, Giridharadas was making the same suggestion. Let us say this about that:

Yesterday, we discussed the exceptionally stupid hour which was staged, on Wednesday night, by the dim-bulb Fox "News" program, Gutfeld!

The hour-long program was childish, ugly, offensively stupid. Yesterday, though, we didn't tell you this:

In the mist of all that Dumb and Stupid, the host built one segment around a recent podcast appearance by AOC—by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez. 

At one time, her performance on that podcast would have been called "politically correct." Today, it would more likely be described as "woke."

In a silly and childish ghost dance, we frequently hide behind the claim that no one can define that term—but everyone, barring only us, knows it when they see it. (You can't offer precise definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" either, but those terms are perfectly useful.).

We were deeply disappointed by the various things we saw AOC say. Even during Wednesday's spectacularly stupid program, Gutfeld and his dim-bulb droogs were basically right—on the merits and on the politics—in pretty much everything they said during that segment.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Our tribe, like all large human tribes, is inherently prone to separation, then to self-admiration and error.

There are voters out there who can be won over. Back in December, we saw how well those university presidents performed, and so did everyone else.

Their performance was astoundingly bad. Many Trump voters observed that debacle. Is it time for our flailing blue tribe to form alliances with sharper and smarter allies?

"Orange man bad" may not be enough! Once in a while, it might not hurt to set aside our moral self-admiration and perhaps try a little tenderness. 

We're not in Yugoslavia yet. But we sometimes seem eager to get there.