Empathy with the victor benefits the rulers.
Walter Benjamin
Democracy, in promise if not in fact, is for losers: for people who lost in hereditary aristocracy and unchecked capitalism that divvied up their bodies like prizes. That keeps my ambitions in scale. I leave triumphalism for people who propose marriage at the New York City Marathon. An election requires the same trait — grace — whether you prevail or you fail. For my money, the great winner of the last three election cycles has been a voluble septuagenarian hand-talker with an endlessly memeable mug and a voice that people delight in mocking. I refer, of course, to Bernard Sanders, who will never be president.
The last moment of gritty loser’s grace on the national stage was a fraternal embrace between Senator Sanders and his brother Larry, who insisted he deliver the delegates of Democrats Abroad to his brother and “bring before this convention the names of our parents, Eli Sanders and Dorothy Glassberg Sanders. They did not have easy lives, and they died young.” So many I love died young; so many live in strange suspension. I am reminded of a brutal fact about the Freedmen’s Bureau, which operated in the Southern states in the years after Emancipation. Many former slaves who applied for marriage licenses were widows, eager to bring before the law the names of their dead spouses. Democracy may one day account for their losses. I attribute none of my impulses to the dead, but my version of a “historic, flawlessly run campaign” — with no apologies to Joy Ann Reid — requires not a single thought for the endorsements of “Billie Eilish, Queen Latifah, the Swifties, and the B-Hive.”
After an election, a wave of explanatory journalism swerves around the losers, and delivers empathy to the victors instead. Officious identity liberals will cite Trump’s victory as evidence that we live in a white man’s country. On The Free Press, one can read “post-liberals” attribute Trump’s success to a multiracial working-class coalition, while their counterparts on the Harris left attribute that voting pattern to, say, Latine machismo or black men’s “cool pose.” All of it strikes me as bullshit. These explanations were written weeks in advance, and it shows; they merely confirm the writers’ prior convictions. (This year, I saw a “why Trump won” story draft in the group chat in September; someone nearly ruined an October bat mitzvah by bouncing a few ideas about the voters of Dearborn near the “candy shop” where we collected our favors.) These are arguments in search of an event; their authors are happy to find it, even when they profess deep grief. The explanation greases the victor’s wheels. Credulous in the presence of triumph, they find kowtowing preferable to Larry’s weeping fraternal embrace.
Most media outlets spend November plastered with empathy for the victor. It is not the case that the “left” went too far or that Trump magically moderated his ethnic populism. It is the case that the campaign was shortened by Joe Biden’s recalcitrance about his age, and Harris’ coronation without a primary, but we have no idea whom a different process would have benefited. I live in an essentially 50/50 country, and no one’s explanation accounts for that simple fact. Perhaps I woke one Tuesday thinking we were all voting to repudiate the Dobbs decision and found, the morning after, that the women of Arizona found no conflict between electing Trump and extending abortion rights. On such a Wednesday, I leave certainty in the drafts. Sense-making is painful and erratic in a context where elections are won and lost by hurricanes on mountain-tops, late autumn storms, inconsistent early and mail-in voting from state-to-state, and stalled cars on the way to polling places. Perhaps you could write a riveting story about caprice, but people prefer arrogant post-mortems. They got used to their good-enough odds, but only because electoral predictions are right as often as coin tosses.
The calcifying conventional wisdom is now, apparently, that the election offered a thorough repudiation of Lia Thomas, the fifth-ranked swimmer in the NCAA Division I national championship, who is transgender. Pretty low electoral stakes, I think. I spent most of my adult life in New Orleans and much of my childhood in South Carolina. I asked the Trump voters I know, who are abundant, about the reasons for their vote. All mentioned the economy; none of them had a clue who Lia Thomas is. Politics remain local. Base determines superstructure. A false consensus emerges in the sweep of red and blue on the map, and is ratified by news stories written to explain some near-future event. The last ratification comes from the Electoral College: the most profound and deliberate mechanism of voter suppression. When we reach 75% turnout, I will be happy to discuss the mood of the country. Until then, we are measuring in fractions.
Trump won in 2016 because 75,000 Midwesterners who voted for Obama switched their votes to a Republican. He won a close election in 2024 because he won more votes in the right states. The keys to his victory are boring, closer to math than political science. The major issues remain worthy of contemplation, but the reward for that is further contemplation, not a thorough repudiation of your enemies.
I find myself content with uncertainty. Nine months before the election, my brother died what political scientists call “a death of despair” on the floor of a restaurant in Upstate South Carolina. On the six-month anniversary, Hurricane Helene devastated the region, and I found myself praying — for a reason I cannot articulate — that the restaurant, at least, would be spared the force of the wind and water. Scarcely into my forties, I have lost two siblings: one in infancy, one in the long war of addiction. Both of our parents survive. I have sometimes thought, during this election season, that only they understand the fierce burdens Joe Biden carries. He is “the designated mourner,” in the words of Fintan O’Toole. Half of his children are dead, and it shows in his gait, his voice, and in the moment of his ascendancy: he won the Presidency during early COVID, a period I date in deaths: from an elderly neighbor to a brilliant student to my first boyfriend. Biden was never my first choice for president, but I have held him in the light in this year of agony. If his election “meant” anything that you can explain in 1,200 words, it was a validation of that pain, of the trip we’re all taking.
Some survive without this sense of alienation and suffering. If they believe that the “other side” of the country is full of white nationalists or deranged communist saboteurs, then they must accept — in a functionally 50/50 country — that this would still be true if the other guy won. They must learn to live with uncertainty and grief. And, after that, they must learn to govern with people that they hate.