Our Neighbors’ Sobering Decision
A majority of America decided our democracy wasn’t worth saving. What about the rest of us stuck here with them?
Election losses happen. I spent my entire teenage and college years working on election campaigns, starting in 2009. A few won, most lost. If you can’t take an election loss, you can’t learn from it, see the progress, then you won’t last. My political career ended on November 8, 2016 - when Donald Trump won the presidency. It was clear the fight we expected over the future of the GOP wouldn’t materialize and the party would coalesce around Trump and his strongman populism, and there would be no room for dissenting factions as during the Bush/McCain/Romney era when libertarians were able to carve out a small but vocal minority in the party. So while I felt the personal loss of losing 2016 and realizing that night my career path I had been working on since I was a teenager was being blown up before my eyes, nothing prepared me for last night.
I knew Trump had a significant chance of winning this election. I even wrote an article warning that Harris was losing and Trump could win the popular vote. I don’t think I believed that when I wrote it - it was more hyperbole - but I didn’t go into last night with my eyes closed. The polls were close, they historically understated Trump support, and Biden was an unpopular incumbent. What became clear as the night went on, though, is that I didn’t myself believe Trump could win. In my gut, I never accepted that was a possibility or thought about what that could mean because I didn’t believe it would happen. Americans were sick of the chaos, sick of Trump’s complete domination of our politics. He had his 47%, for sure, but some of that are people who will never vote anything other than Republican even if they nominated Bernie Sanders due to a clerical error.
When it became clear that Harris was underperforming in Wisconsin and Michigan, after losing Georgia and North Carolina, I shut down. I am usually the one who powers through everything, disasters, deaths, emotional setbacks. I’m not a very emotional person, and I have a “power ahead” personality. I lead a sales team for a living (it’s like politics but they pay you more!), I have to drive the energy literally every day. I couldn’t move off my couch for almost an hour. I didn’t stick around to watch Trump’s acceptance speech. I still haven’t watched it, actually. I love elections, I love speeches, I love watching elections and how it’s covered by the media. That’s pretty much the basis of my entire Twitter account for the last seventeen years. I haven’t turned on the news today. I am taking what I think the kids call a “mental health day,” though I would roll my eyes at myself if I said that out loud.
The Trump win is not just another win by another candidate I didn’t like very much. There are many, many reason why I think Trump is a danger to Americans. His stated tariff plan would explode inflation and kill jobs. His deportation plan has the potential to be the biggest single human rights disaster since Japanese internment in WWII - and in that context, it seems almost inappropriate to mention it would be a horrible for the economy too. His anti-trans rhetoric looks set to explode bigotry - or worse - against an already vulnerable group of Americans and potentially undo decades of progress on civil rights. His education plans have the explicit goal of ensuring that kids don’t learn in school - going to far as to advocating for direct election of principals, destroying the already fraying American education system and putting our country at a massive disadvantage globally. Removing taxes on tips will drive nearly every customer-facing American job to tipped wages. All this is in Agenda47, Trump’s own detailed policy book, and is not even touching Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s own blueprint for how they want to change the federal government.
Trump may or may not do these things. He has been famous for talking about major plans and then getting talked out of them. But Trump did do much of what he wanted in his first term, and that was with a team around him that at best was protecting him from himself and at worst was largely incompetent. He has had eight years now to remake and rebuild the party apparatus in his image, and the Republican cadre of bureaucrats and functionaries who carry out the work of governing are all now Trump acolytes. Trump can and will use the force of the federal government to ensure compliance. Take his constant threats to punish broadcast networks like CBS and NBC by threatening their FCC licenses. While current law would make threatening the affiliates’ licenses difficult, the FCC has wide mandate to regulate broadcast television. A Trump-dominated FCC could make doing business hell for local affiliates and network-owned stations which don’t play ball, which can make them think twice about covering embarrassing or negative stories. Trump’s tariffs and the power of the regulatory state can similarly drive other big companies into compliance, and we have already seen major newspapers not endorse candidates out of fear of angering the president-elect. America has the real danger of becoming a captured state - much like South Africa is still trying to build itself out from.
But even if Trump doesn’t use the levers of state power to benefit himself, a remarkable turn of events, there is a fundamentally more damning and long term consequence that has already occurred. A majority of Americans chose to elect a man who just four years ago tried to overturn the results of the last election. Trump was never held accountable for the January 6th insurrection attempt. The Republican senate, which could have, without serious political consequence for the first time, ended Trump by impeaching him in 2021, chose not to do so. The federal cases against him look set to be dropped by the Trump DOJ upon taking office, and it is unlikely any state cases will succeed given the mess of a case brought in Atlanta was the best shot at that. The American voters opened the door to any wanna-be dictator for life, including Trump, that there will be no serious consequences for attempting to subvert the rule of law and democracy. This isn’t just a “oh that’s a bad look” situation. It is not hyperbole to say that the era of a peaceful transfer of power at all levels of government are probably over, for at least a generation. I hope I’m wrong, and that Trump is an aberration and he or his chosen successor will go peacefully in January 2029, but I find that hard to believe.
America under Trump again is a less stable country, a poorer country, a harder country to live in for everyone. A place where people do not want to move to, a place where people do not want to stay. Jobs will be less plentiful, goods will be more expensive. Businesses will shy away from the risk of an unstable, captured federal government. Trump’s America is not the “indispensable nation,” its a renegade sideshow with nuclear weapons. It’s not lost on me that the America Trump wants to build is best mirrored by Russia under Putin, whose consolidation of power in the 2000s looked much like the paragraphs above.
I wish I had an answer for what we can do about it. As I wrote a few weeks back, Americans like to talk about freedom, but they don’t like to vote for it. The truth is that most Trump voters either want an authoritarian government because they believe democracy has not served them, or they don’t believe these things will happen. The vast majority are in the latter camp, and those are our friends, neighbors, family. We can be angry at them - I am extremely angry at them - for voting away our country. If we want to have a chance at getting out of this, however, we will need to extend an olive branch to them. There will be elections in 2026 and 2028. They will be extremely difficult, with Trump’s administration using every lever they can to ensure they win. The earlier a strong, diverse, anti-Trump coalition can win in Congress and take back the White House, the better. The longer Trump and the Trumpist GOP controls the federal and friendly state governments, the more the institutional rot will make it difficult to ever return America to being a liberal democracy again.
I do want to share two articles written by people I admire elsewhere on the Internet. They helped me process yesterday’s events. The first is a rundown on thoughts from liberal/libertarian (he gets into that) author Jacob Grier, who approaches yesterday from the same libertarian-leaning perspective that I do. I share his criticism of modern libertarianism, but he also talks about the media environment and international contexts - after all, most Western nations’ incumbent governments have fallen since 2021, it just so happens our opposition was a fascist madman!
The other is a scathing and viscerally angry post by Ken White, better known as Popehat. Let me be clear that when I say it’s “scathing and viscerally angry,” that’s a compliment. I wholeheartedly endorse his admonishment to not simply roll over and let Trumpists take over this country:
Trump won; opposition to Trump lost. People will want you to abandon your believes because of that. They want you to bend the knee. Screw them. Evil has won before and will win again, and it’s not an excuse to shrug and go with the flow. It’s going to get harder to stand up for decent values. You will face scorn, official suppression, even violence. That’s not enough reason to stop.
These are dark times. There is no yesterday anymore, no coming back. The America of the ‘90s, the America of the ‘00s (which we thought was rough!), the America of the ‘10s, will all be seen as the good old days. Before a global pandemic and before America voted away our stability, democracy, and sanity. If you didn’t sign up for saving a country, well too bad, we’ve all been drafted. Let’s work hard now to save it peacefully, before we lose the flawed but beautiful country we’ve all called home for good.