There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was
America.
Trump’s
ugly speech told us exactly where we’re going — and it’s nowhere good.
Opinion
Columnist
- Nov. 4, 2020, 12:16 p.m. ET
We still do not know who is the winner
of the presidential election. But we do know who is the loser: the United
States of America.
We have just experienced four years of
the most divisive and dishonest presidency in American history, which attacked
the twin pillars of our democracy — truth and trust. Trump did not spend a
single day of his term trying to be president of all the people, and he broke
rules and trashed norms in ways that no president ever dared — right up to last
night when he falsely claimed election fraud and summoned the Supreme Court to
step in and stop the voting, as if such a thing were even remotely possible.
“Frankly, we did win this election,”
Trump declared, while millions of ballots remained to be counted in Wisconsin,
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
“We’ll be going to
the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump added, without explaining how or on what basis.
“We want all voting to stop.’’
We want all voting to stop? You can’t do
that.
But if Biden wins — and we may not know
for days — it may be by just a sliver of votes in several key battleground
states. Although he’ll likely win the popular vote, there will be no landslide
— no overwhelming majority telling Trump and those around him that enough was
enough: Be gone with you and never bring that kind of politics of division back
to this country again.
“Whatever the final vote, it is already
clear that the number of Americans saying, ‘Enough is enough’ was not enough,’’
said Dov Seidman, an expert on leadership and author of the book “How: Why How
We Do Anything Means Everything.’’
“There was no blue political wave,’’ he
added. “But, more importantly, there was no moral wave. There was no widespread
rejection of the kind of leadership that divides us, especially in a
pandemic.’’
We are a country with multiple compound
fractures, and so we simply cannot do anything ambitious anymore — like put a
man on the moon — because ambitious things have to be done together. We
couldn’t even come together to all wear masks in a pandemic, when health
experts tell us it would absolutely save lives. It would be so simple, so easy
and so patriotic to say, “I protect you and you protect me.’’ And yet, we can’t
do it.
This election, if anything, highlighted
the fault lines. The president, using many different dog whistles during the
campaign, presented himself as the leader of America’s shrinking white
majority. It is impossible to explain his continued support, despite his
unprecedented poisonous behavior in office, without reference to two numbers:
The U.S. Census
Bureau projects that by the middle of this year, nonwhites will
constitute a majority of the nation’s 74
million children. At the same time, it is estimated that by sometime
in the 2040s, whites will make up 49 percent of the U.S. population, and
Latinos, Blacks, Asians and multiracial populations 51 percent.
There is clearly a discomfort, and even
resistance, among many whites, particularly white working-class males without
college degrees, to the fact that our nation is in a steady process of becoming
“minority white.” They see Trump as a bulwark against the social, cultural and
economic implications of that.
What many Democrats see as a good trend
— a country reckoning with structural racism and learning to embrace and
celebrate increasing diversity — many white people see as a fundamental
cultural threat.
And that is fueling another lethal
trend this election only reinforced.
“Many Republican senators and
congressional representatives — like Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and John
Cornyn in Texas — won by hugging Trump,’’ said Gautam Mukunda, author of
“Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.’’ “That means that Trumpism is the
future of the G.O.P. The tactically unique thing about Trumpism is that it
never even tries to get the support of the majority of Americans. So the G.O.P.
will continue with the strategy of using every legal, but democratically deeply
harmful, way to control power even though most Americans vote against them —
like the way they just crammed through two Supreme Court justices.”
That means all the stresses on the
American system of government will continue to grow, Mukunda added, because in
our antiquated electoral system, Republicans theoretically can control both the
White House and Senate — despite the desires of a large majority of the
American people. “No system can survive that kind of stress,’’ he concluded.
“It will break at some point.’’
Nothing has happened, even if Biden
wins, that suggests that Republicans will fundamentally rethink this political
strategy that they perfected under Mr. Trump.
But Democrats have a lot to rethink as
well, notes Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard and author of “The Tyranny
of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.’’
“Even though Joe
Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,’’ Sandel told me, “the
Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and
college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted
its base. Even so epochal an event as a pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not
change this. Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do many working people embrace
a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to
address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy
has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.”
Again, while Biden made small inroads
with working-class voters, there seems to be no huge shift. Maybe because many
working-class Trump voters not only feel looked down upon, but they also resent
what they see as cultural censorship from liberal elites, coming out of college
campuses.
As Rich Lowry, the editor of National
Review, wrote in an Oct. 26 essay, “Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost
symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept
along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports,
the big foundations, and almost everything in between.”
“To put it in blunt terms,” he
continued, “for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to
brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American
culture. This may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it
doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.’’
This election shows that view seems to
be still very alive among Trump voters.
I confess that the hardest conversations
I had last night were with my daughters. I so badly want to tell them that all
is going to be OK, that we’ve been through bad patches as a country before. And
I hope that will turn out to be the case — that whoever wins this election will
draw the right conclusion that we simply cannot go on tearing one another apart
this way.
But I could not, in all honesty, tell
them that with any confidence. I am certain “the better angels of our nature’’
are still out there, but our politics and our political system right now are
not inspiring them to emerge at the scale and speed that we so desperately
need.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs
Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer
Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,”
which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
