Stephen Helgesen, 8/10/24
I’ll freely admit it. I was wrong. I predicted that Trump wouldn’t win Wisconsin or Michigan, but in my defense I did get all the others right. My scenario included a 288 electoral vote win with AZ, GA, NV and PA, but I had no idea the cheeseheads would join the auto workers and give Kamala the thumbs down. Being a native of America’s Dairyland, I had every expectation that the über liberal Progressive Democrats who live in the Badger state’s big city centers would once again mobilize their band of university professors, students and all the older White suburban women to turn out in huge numbers to crush all the Norwegian bachelor farmers on the other side of the political cornfields of the state.
I was also wrong about the auto workers and the other good people of Michigan (I was a proud UAW auto worker for four years and did live in Michigan back in the fifties) about their choice to resist voting against their own self-interests. It restoreth my faith in my fellow mid-westerners’ willingness to hitch up old Dobbin or fire up their gas guzzler and point her/it in the direction of the polling place and do the right thing for themselves and their country by voting for the future without abandoning the past.
That’s what this is really all about, you know. It was a choice between returning to one golden age of true, verifiable, American values and exporting them into the present where they belong rather than offering the voters more of the same empty calories of pablum that the Democrats had been peddling since their Messianic candidate Barack Obama stepped on to the scene and told them that a mantra of hope and change would somehow transport them to the top of the Big Rock Candy Mountain where unicorns played under rainbows.
Honest Abe was on the Americans’ ballot this week or at least his thought about politics was. He was reputed to have said in 1858 that “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Yes, all of the people weren’t fooled this time and they made their voices heard. Now it is up to the other half of the country to accept the fact that when you push stout hearted men and thinking women into a corner and try to convince them that it’s in their best interests they will eventually push back.
The bare fact is, this election proved that while most Americans are basically patient people their patience will not be subordinated or replaced by false narratives that portray them as reactionaries that prefer obstruction to the truth. And while they may not have agreed with everything that our new President-elect has said or supported his choice of tactics during the heated atmosphere of an bitterly-fought campaign, they will always choose their own self-interests over a mischaracterization of them by an opposition that tried to convince them that they were racists or facists simply because they didn’t buy in to a bait and switch at the ballot box.
Good autopsies are messy.
In the coming weeks and maybe months, the media will embark on a twin journey to find a scapegoat or convenient excuse for the Democrats’ loss while they begin writing Joe Biden’s legacy for him. Such is the nature of politics and most human endeavors when it comes to losing anything. Unfortunately, ideologues are generally unwilling to entertain the notion that something might be wrong with their ideology. Nobody likes to question their own basic beliefs and this is especially true of politicians, but if the Left really wants to discover the truth about their failure they must be willing to lay bare not only the body of their candidate but of their entire ideology as well. But the question is, can they or will they do it?
Most political defeats can be attributed to a host of pretty standard mistakes or missteps, but this election was different in that many of the same variables and causes all came together at once and that will make this autopsy more difficult to assess. The confluence of multiple factors will only make it more important for political anaylsts to get it right, and when (and if) they do, they will have to steel themselves and risk angering their benefactors if their analyses point to a failure of their clients’ ideologies as the principal cause of demise.
I’ve always been a believer in the principle/theory of Occam’s razor as a way to determine the most probable explanation for just about anything, but when it comes to this election outcome, I doubt that it can be THE guiding principle. We may never know exactly why Kamala Harris or the Democrats lost, but the fact that we may be left with a lingering doubt of THE principle cause of the death of her campaign that should not prevent keep us from digging through the messy entrails of her political corpus for the real reason. The country will be better off if we do.
Even after witnessing the fatal close quarters gunshot assault of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth, an autopsy was performed on the dead president the next day. Lincoln’s death shocked and saddened much of the country, but probably pleased millions of southerners who blamed him for their defeat. Shouldn’t our country now demand the same kind of ideological autopsy when it comes to the results of a truly monumental election such as the one we just experienced? It can’t hurt the dead but it could help the living.
Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven of which are on American politics and has written over 1,400 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He can be reached at: stephenhelgesen@gmail.com
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