“The First Time as Tragedy, the Second Time as Farce”

And it turns out none of it mattered.

The polls really were wrong. Just not in the way anyone had guessed; no one had “solid proper rinsing by Trump” in their list of guesses.

The usual post-election grievance, told-you-so, cognitive bias express—she’d have won if only she’d agreed with me on this—quickly descended into vacuous points-scoring as the scale of the rinsing settled in. Because there wasn’t One Cool Trick that could have won this one—it turns out this really wasn’t an election about policy, or campaigns, or ground game, or Get Out The Vote, or spending, or experience, or the personal qualities of the candidates, or The Information Environment, or even Harris’ race or gender. This really was a vibes election; and the vibe that won was “ehhh, who cares.”

Because the candidate that won was “did not vote.” As I write this, Trump got a million and change less votes than he got when he lost in 2020, Harris meanwhile got about 12 million less than Biden. Unlike early indications, a whole lot of people stayed home. That’s a large enough number to defy easy explanation.

It’s traditional, in these sorts of pieces, to offer a theory of explanation, so here’s mine: I think this is where a decade-plus of Obstructionism-as-Policy paid off. The point to gumming up the works wasn’t to change minds or drum up support, but to make voting seem pointless. And so, when it mattered, a whole lot of people threw up their hands and stayed home.

You add to that the increased prices in the shadow of the pandemic, and a country awash in right wing propoganda as background noise—again, the the goal of which is to suppress turnout—and the demographic that determined the outcome were the “low-information” former voters who said, “nothing ever changes, what’s the point?” (Probably with a side order of “I voted to save democracy the last two times, and all that happened is my grocery bill doubled.”)

This also happens on a backdrop of the elections in the shadow of the pandemic being very bad for incumbents world-wide, so there’s an element of “throw the bastards out”, but keep in mind people didn’t change sides, they just declined to participate. There certainly were some small number of Biden-Trump voters, and we’ll be hearing endless fawning interviews with them over the coming weeks, but it seems clear they didn’t make a difference.

It would be so much easier if there was a thing. Personally, I desperately want the reason to be whatever idiot told Tim Walz to stop saying “weird”, but it seems clear, looking at the numbers, that this result was priced in early; whoever the Blue Team ran was going to lose, and whoever the Red Team ran was going to win, all other details being unimportant. No big lesson here, no moral point, just apathy. It’s hard to believe anyone would sit this one out, but being able to turn away while muttering “not my problem,” is a core American trait. There’s something poetic about America choosing autocracy because not choosing it wasn’t worth the effort.

The other worst American vice is a sort of toxic optimism, the belief that things will work out, it’s not that bad, it’ll be fine, you’re overreacting. I am here to tell you: no. This is not going to be okay. We’re in real trouble now. This time, we are well and truly fucked.

I don’t think any of us are capable of imagining the catastrophe that has befallen us. Not necessarily because of the scale, but because while deadly, it is going to be so stupid. Less 90s Dystopian Movie Future and more dropping dead from the results of a regulation-free food supply. Speedrunning the reasons why we have a professional civil service.

There’s some cold comfort from the knowledge that there’s going be plenty of opportunities for grim, joyless schadenfreude over the next few years as the leopards gorge themselves on faces. I have to confess an almost hysterical fascination with how the “Find Out” phase of “Oops All Tariffs” is going to go.

But make no mistake: everyone, everywhere, is in more danger now than they were a week ago.

It’s also traditional to end these sorts of pieces with a ray of hope, an exhortation to keep fighting, a source of optimism. On those fronts, I will decline. Partly, because as we’ve just demonstrated, Hope leaves a lot to be desired as a strategy; as the man says, it’s the hope that kills you. The aesthetics of “resistance” didn’t work last time. Optimism is what got us here in the first place. The moment calls for something else. Some “secret third thing.” I don’t know what that is yet, and neither does anyone else.

All we can do now is hang on to each other and brace for impact.