What If Kamala Wins?
Earlier this week, I took a look at what might unfold if Donald Trump wins the election and becomes president once again. The outcome of the election remains a coin flip, so today, I’ll address the possibility of a Kamala Harris presidency.
To start with, the betting markets are giving Trump the edge and Republican pundits are practically coronating The Former Guy, but the polling remains extremely close in both national polling and swing states. In fact, as Trump closes in national polling but the Electoral College remains a tossup, it opens up the possibility of a Trump win in the popular vote with a Harris win in the Electoral College. That would be deeply ironic but not good for the country at all.
However it happens, a Harris presidency would start with a crisis as Donald Trump challenges the outcome of the election and whips MAGA into a violent frenzy. I think there is a chance of violence if Trump wins, but the chances are much greater if Trump loses.
For the first few months of the crisis, Kamala won’t be president, but she will undoubtedly have some influence over the Biden Administration’s response. How Harris and Biden respond to this crisis will set the tone for her presidency. As Garry Trudeau pointed out in Sunday’s “Doonesbury” comic, it would be an official act with absolute immunity if the Biden Administration simply locked up Donald Trump to keep him from causing trouble. However fun this is to think about, I don’t think it would be a good course.
Once Kamala takes office, things get immediately murky. Where Trump has a disturbing track record, Harris doesn’t have much of one at all. In fact, there seem to be two Kamalas. One was the hardcore progressive that ran for president in 2020 and the other is the more moderate candidate from this year. Which is the real Kamala?
I have not performed an exhaustive investigation of Harris’s policy positions over time, but speaking to Jamie Weinstein on The Dispatch Podcast, David Frum made the case that she is a typical liberal rather than a staunch progressive. Frum pointed out that she veered left in 2020 based on faulty polling and that it didn’t work. He speculates that she learned from the experience and may be less inclined to chase public opinion in the future. If so, that would be a good thing in a President Harris.
I think there is hope that Kamala will maintain her moderate positions from the campaign, especially after seeing how the backlash to progressive policies from the Biden Administration almost put Donald Trump back in the White House. Harris may realize that her best hope for a second term is to govern from the middle rather than veering back to the left. As I’ve said before, whichever party realizes that they can be sane and win the middle repeatedly will seize on a long-term majority… as long as they can keep their crazies in check.
And even if Harris tries to veer left, she probably won’t be able to. The odds are very good that Republicans will control at least the Senate and possibly the entire Congress. This would make Harris’s agenda DOA from the outset.
Republican control of the Senate would also eliminate any possibility of Harris pushing to remove the filibuster. There would be no point in taking the public opinion hit on nuking the filibuster if the opposition party had a congressional majority.
Harris has advocated ending the filibuster for abortion legislation, but even if Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, it won’t be her call. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said only that the Democratic caucus would “discuss” the proposal. Schumer may well remember the price that Democrats paid after Harry Reid nuked the judicial filibuster. They are still paying it with a trio of Trump appointees that could not be blocked and a long list of increasingly partisan judges.
When it comes to abortion, without the end of the filibuster, there will no codification of Roe and no national abortion ban. With the filibuster in place, there is a stalemate between the evenly divided parties. Without the filibuster, we might find that the situation gets worse as the pendulum swings between very permissive abortion laws and outright bans with successive Administrations and Congresses.
There might be more hope for immigration reform, however. Republicans and Democrats came very close to agreement earlier this year on a bill largely authored by immigration hawks. Donald Trump scuttled that bill from his campaign, but if Trump loses, there is a real chance that Democrats, who got hammered on the border this election, will be able to find enough common ground with Republicans to reform the system. As I’ve said before, anything a president can do unilaterally is nothing more than patchwork on a badly broken, antiquated, and often contradictory system.
Foreign policy is one of Harris’s strongest areas. While Harris is not a free trader, she is better than Trump on international trade and tariff policy. She is a strong supporter of Israel (the Biden Administration actually deployed US troops to Israel to help defend against Iranian missiles) and in one of the most important differences with Donald Trump, she is also a strong supporter of Ukraine. Helping Ukraine to defend itself is vital to prevent Russia from starting an even larger war as well as to keep China from getting aggressive ideas about Taiwan.
Culture war issues are where Harris would be weakest. She would likely continue unpopular Biden policies on transgender education and sports. This bureaucratic rulemaking is being reined in by the Supreme Court, however. A ruling last summer overturned the Chevron deference and severely limits the ability of federal agencies to make new administrative law. The decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and Relentless v. Department of Commerce puts the legislative ball back in Congress’s court where it belongs and limits the authority of presidents to do Congress’s job.
Harris’s ability to act on other culture war issues will be similarly limited by the courts and Congress. Even Democrats should applaud this because it will help to save the party from itself. In a perfect world, the new dynamic will force Congress to focus on crafting laws rather than soundbites.
If Kamala Harris turns out to be the mediocre president that Republicans predict, the Democratic Party will pay a price at the polls. Midterm elections could extend Republican majorities if they can find candidates who aren’t crazy. Statistics and logic would also favor a Republican victory in the presidential election in 2028, again assuming Republicans can pick a candidate who isn’t crazy.
Kamala Harris is a bit of an enigma. That may be a negative, but the fact that Trump is not an enigma is a definite negative for him. A different Republican would probably be running 10 points ahead of Harris, but Trump is stuck in a dead heat and created more trouble for himself with a racist comedian at a Madison Square Garden rally.
The set by Tony Hinchcliffe singled out Puerto Rico as a “garbage island” in the most quoted joke, but Hinchcliffe also attacked blacks, Jews, and Palestinians. The Bulwark reported that the set had initially included a joke calling Harris a “c-nt.” That joke was axed by the Trump campaign but not the racist ones. Trump has not personally renounced the performance, which may be a bigger problem than the comedian himself. In most years, October surprises come from the other campaign, but again Trump has to be different.
The good thing for Harris skeptics is that she would almost certainly be constrained by congressional Republicans. The same is not true of Donald Trump who, for at least two years, might have control of both houses of Congress and a party that is unwilling to tell him no about anything.
An election that gave us Kamala and gridlock is not the worst outcome we could hope for.
We will be in a much better place if Harris wins. We will have elected some with decency and dignity and competence.Report
Maybe the Republicans will say “well, this didn’t work either, back to the Bush family.”Report
All the people likely to say that have been run out of the party.Report
Liz Cheney is actively campaigning for Harris.
How do the Republicans not see that?!?Report
IndeedReport
The GOP is now fully owned by the MAGA movement. “Republicans” as we used to know them are either to afraid to buck that for fear of loosing their power or they have resigned themselves to playing along hoping they can move the needle on their preferred policy outcomes. Most no longer consider Cheney or Kinsinger or any of the other “republicans” endorsing Harris to actually be in the GOP much less MAGA. The ones who do will quietly vote for Harris and hope no one finds out.Report
Depends on whether the Democratic Party controls Congress or not. The worse thing that can happen is that the current policies continue.Report
If Kamala wins we will forestall the end of democracy by a bit.
But as I keep repeating, the losing side will make the plausible claim that if they had only tried a little bit harder they would win it next time.
And so they will.
The Onion can again print their headline- “Shrieking White Hot Ball Of Rage Captures Early Lead For Republican Nomination”.
Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbot, or whoever the loudest, most shrieking white hot ball of rage is will pick up Trump’s endorsement and we will be revisiting this same discussion.Report
Riffing off this, you reminded me of the reason I don’t think the Harris-conservative right coalition (the Cheneys, Alberto Gonzalez, etc.) is as benign as a lot of liberals seem to:
Greg Abbott is a very good illustration of what conservativism means in the MAGA-run Republican Party: he was a classic Texas “business” Republican like Perry and Bush before him, a guy who would throw the culture-war obsessed base (now MAGA) a bone or two now and then, but whose primary focus was making Texas as friendly to (big) business as is physically, logically, and metaphysically possible (to the detriment of a whole lot of other state government services, but more on that in a bit). Then the pandemic hit, and the response became a culture war issue for MAGA, which caused them to turn on Abbott (censures and votes of no confidence in county parties, e.g.), who panicked and almost instantaneously reinvented himself as MAGA: he redoubled his previously mostly bone-throwing efforts to make it seem like the border was open and criminals were flowing in by the bazillions; he went all in on abortion; he went full anti-trans; etc., etc. He’s still a business Republican to the extent that one can be MAGA and a business Republican (MAGA does put limits on it, of various sorts, but also makes being anti-any environmental protections easier, which, e.g., Space X has been able to take advantage of), but he leads with MAGA, and there’s no going back for him or the state Republican Party generally, at least until MAGA loses its stranglehold on the party in Texas and beyond.
The lesson of Abbot and the Texas Republican Party behind him is this: if you are a staunch conservative in the old Texas sense, and you find the MAGAs distasteful, you won’t have any meaningful representation in the party for the foreseeable future. You are now basically the GOP equivalent of disgruntled Berniecrats, and like them, you have two main choices, plus a third that isn’t really available to left-liberals: you can stick with the GOP, and try to change it from within, knowing that this will be a long and painful struggle; you can start a third party, and resign yourself to irrelevance; or, unlike the Berniecrats, you can join the other party.
It looks like a whole lot of them, and importantly, some with influence and connections, have chosen this last option, and Harris has not only embraced them, but campaigned to capture more of them by openly shifting her rhetoric to the right on issues like immigration. This might of course be temporary, particularly if Trump loses and his influence begins to wane as he gets older and can no longer exercise the same control over the party he has for the last 8 years, but I’d bet a whole lot of non-MAGA conservatives who’ve committed to voting for Harris have noted the shift in her rhetoric, and are thinking less about how they transition back into the GOP in a year or two than about whether what they’re part of is a party realignment, and if so, how they can begin to influence the direction of the Democratic Party from within.
Don’t be surprised if, over the next few years, a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party begins in earnest, not between more centrist liberals and the small but vocal liberal left, but between conservatives and centrist liberals, with progressives and former Berniecrats increasingly left out in the cold (though they’ll still be blamed for election failures, of course).Report
Kick out the Berniecrats and I’d be trilled to join a more business friendly Team Blue.Report
See?Report
The Democrats mostly did, and the few remaining aren’t driving the bus.
But sure I guess performance is more important now, and the Berniecrats are seen as the let’s performative politics.Report
I think pretty much all the Berniecrats vote Dem. Some of them even run for office (one of Austin’s congressmembers was just here with Bernie and AOC as part of his reelection campaign). But yeah, their influence, to the extent that it was ever real, is waning, and a party of Harrises and Cheneys would probably freeze them out entirely.Report
Say what you will about Abbott types, but they have more money, are a much more stable clientele, and are much less interested in scaring the horses.Report
I think the Abbott’s of the world realized that if they want to continue to let Oracle and Samsung and Space X and their friend with 20 car dealerships make a ton of money in Texas with few regulations (especially environmental ones) and some help from the state’s Enterprise Fund, they’re going to have to at least look, on the outside, like they’re full MAGA. I think this really does create limits on the business side, though at least in the short term, businesses seem to think that those limits are outweighed by the pluses (seriously, Space X could create an uninhabitable wasteland down in South Texas, and Tesla could do so in Central Texas, without an environmental regulator in sight). But yeah, if you want to help people increase their profits from within the GOP right now, you gotta at least wear a MAGA mask, if not embrace it wholeheartedly (it’s always difficult to tell, even with Trump, where the mask ends and the real person begins).
There are gonna be a lot of conservatives who want nothing to do with the MAGA mask. Some of them maybe find it distasteful, others have principles (at least one or two, right?), and others may believe, probably correctly, that in the long run MAGA is not great for profits.
Abbott has shown he can shift on a dime, so if MAGA loses control of the party, he’ll have no problem shifting right back into being early-Aughts Rick Perry. I think others (pretty much anyone in Florida) may have welded the mask to their faces, to the extent that they have real faces at all.Report
How many folks would the Dems lose *REALLY* if they made themselves more hospitable to the reasonable Republicans like the Cheneys, the Kristols, and the Frums?
This is an opportunity!Report
Heh, this is the meanest thing you’ve ever written.
“reasonable Republicans like the Cheneys, the Kristols, and the Frums”Report
My answer would be probably not many, which is one of the biggest criticisms of the Democrats i can imagine.Report
Cosign.Report
I don’t expect them to become liberals but I’ve heard there is some reporting from early voter polls (always shaky) that Harris is doing excellent with Democrats and Unaffiliated voters but she is also pulling in a fair number of registered Republicans. Though I can’t find it now.
Stop the Steal 2.0 is already in motion and Harris needs to win a bunch of states by healthy margins to put more locks on shenanigans. We just saw the Supremely Reactionary 6 willing to break with long-standing principal to help purge voters in Virginia and presumably give other states permission to do so.Report
I’m not saying they don’t need them to win, because they probably do. I’m just saying that I’ve heard a lot of liberals say that it’s just a temporary coalition, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If I were a liberal, I’d be much more worried.Report
I think it’s something like a regression to the mean; the Democratic Party as a clearly liberal/progressive/Near Left party is a recent development if it’s a development at all.
That said, I also think the hold that conservatism is going to exert over suburban PMC Near Rightists who join the Dems is not going to be all that strong.Report
I can speak to this, as a Reagan Republican turned Obama Democrat.
When people make political conversions, the results are unpredictable and vary widely.
Currently when some like me or Jennifer Rubin belongs to a political party, we claim a suite of beliefs. We feel this way on abortion and that way on taxes, and generally accept the party orthodoxy.
But when you start to question your beliefs, it turns out that a lot of what people claim to believe is really just received dogma that we don’t interrogate all that much.
Because for most of us we don’t really need to. it’s not like most of us really want or need to study economic theory or the morality of capital punishment. These things are usually abstraction.
So when you join a new congregation you end up sitting next to new people who have different experiences and by osmosis and reflection and peer pressure we adopt new ideas.
But some or a lot of the old ones hang on, even if expressed in new ways.
Like how I am now the middle aged middle class Establishment Dad you saw in the movie The Graduate, the one who had just one word to say to Benjamin.
Except the Establishment I belong to is the broad New Deal/Great Society framework, with a newer, broadened acceptance of personal freedoms.
I can’t predict how the stampede of Frums and Rubins and assorted ex-Republicans will cause the Democrats to evolve but I bet it will be in ways we find hard to imagine.
From for instance is a big supporter of the Military Industrial Complex, which as you know is really a type of socialism. I can easily see the neocons embracing some sort of Jobs Program, draped National Security robes.Report
This is veering off topic a bit… but I have an emerging concern that the Polling/Vibes situation is going to cause grief if Harris wins.
Right now the Polling says it’s a toss-up; but the ‘vibes’ are all… [whispers] probably Trump.
If Trump wins, then people go… yeah, I was afraid of that, but whatch’a gonna do?
If Harris wins with Trump vibing? Ugh, worst case scenario.
I don’t think there will be a ‘coup’ … just all sorts of lawfare and a further erosion of legitimacy. The point isn’t that this particular election will be fraudulent, its that we need election processes to be bullet proof from a perception point of view. Having 50 different election processes worked when the 50 states had higher internal trust (very high trust in Chicago, I might add) but like a lot of things that worked one way with lower tech, and a different way with mid-tech, we’re falling behind with high-tech. We should invest in the voting process.
I low-key thought Biden should have spent capital on Voting Process Legitimacy efforts — which would’ve likely required a concession on Voter ID in exchange for unified agreement on Mail-in voting/counting/processes with restrictions on who can VBM, bans on States discussing early voting demographics, a National holiday for election day, etc. etc. All designed to shore up the *legitimacy* of the process, not the usual slap fights over turn-out suppression real or imagined.
I’m glad that congress spend *some* capital on reforming the Electoral Count Act, so that’s something… but now I wish we’d spent more on Congress establishing baseline requirements — which I believe they can do constitutionally — for the States to follow.
Finally, I know folks here are very pro-VBM… I’m not against it, entirely, I just have qualms that it works well as trust erodes. Like, it’s a high-trust/high-collaboration method of voting. And we’re not high-trust/high-collaboration anymore.
To whit, I find it amusing that the DNC is running ads showing Women exchanging knowing glances *at a polling place* and voting for Harris to ‘betray’ their husbands’ expectations; but as I’ve written here (humorously) VBM was awesome for me and my patriarchy because we all voted together and I know exactly how all four of us (3 women) voted! I now have 6 voters whose ballots come to my house. Big win for the patriarchy! No knowing glances under the stern gaze of the Pater Familias. But we did have cookies and cocoa.
Oh well, water, bridges, milk, spills, eggs, baskets etc.Report
Ahem… let me recite this first: If Trump and his supporters weren’t so detached from reality and ginned up with anti-democratic fanaticism that they’re willing to violently disrupt lawful election processes or lash out over a loss then we wouldn’t have this problem. They have agency and are the source of the (hypothetical) crisis. Theres no BSDIing around it.
Ok, now that I’ve said that, I think there’s a basic problem with long held positions becoming out of step with existing realities and circumstances. Now that Democrats are (rightly!) most concerned about election crisis I’d like to think some investment would be made to sure up these processes, which I’d also think should be an easier sell to a party that’s becoming a lot more gentrified. The problem I believe is that there are still way too many people still drinking the emerging majority, demographics as destiny kool aid. The Republicans of course aren’t operating at a level of self awareness to understand that it’s them most likely to pose a threat to election integrity. Or if they are it wouldn’t shock me if they made up some reason to torpedo reform the same way they did the border bill in February.
I’m also with you on VBM. Doesn’t offend my sensibilities but it might be more trouble than its worth. At least in those eastern states that haven’t been doing it since Michael Cain rode west in his covered wagon. If anyone is hiding anything with it my bet is it’s more likely husbands concealing their Trump votes from their wives.Report
Yeah, this isn’t a BSDI post… I think it’s good policy for the US to update what’s clearly a voting system that is eroding legitimacy owing to 50 different polities using different methods and processes and timelines to determine Federal elections.
Much of that is a Constitutional artifact; but Congress has limited authority to mandate certain standards; but more importantly, taking what seems to work… let’s say VBM in some Western States and Electric counting in FL and providing additional (bi-partisan) funding/standards is the goal here.
It really would be more of a Political Capital project than a one-party ‘fixes’ the systems sort of thing.
Regarding husbands… unpossible.Report
I’m in agreement. But If I didn’t have that first paragraph I’d be fragged. You know how this place is in the run up to an election.Report
Oh, right, I sometimes forget the perqs of being the odd Catholic Distributist Crank that no one gets or takes seriously. Some of you have reputations to uphold.Report
I suspect that there will be considerable difficulty in finding a single voting system that enough state delegations will get behind. There are states that want a traditional system emphasizing election day voting at hundreds/thousands of neighborhood precinct places. There are states that have gone full-on vote by mail that have minimal in-person voting locations. Some of the latter group actually discourage, at least indirectly, in-person voting. My state is one of those, with warnings that in-person election-day voting may require a lengthy drive and long wait.
The most recent version of the Congressional Democrats’ bill on the subject actually followed the worst path I can imagine, requiring that states go to the expense of having both precincts and vote by mail systems sufficient to handle the full load.Report
I’m sure you’re right… but honestly, I think your state is going too far in the other direction.
“Some of the latter group actually discourage, at least indirectly, in-person voting. My state is one of those, with warnings that in-person election-day voting may require a lengthy drive and long wait.”
But that’s part of the point of the project… elections across 50 states require adequate funding and tooling and training plus some flexibility unique to various contingencies — but within certain parameters.
In the best possible scenario it’s a national unity project which will get buy-in from the vast majority — even as it gores various oxen from place to place.
Strikes me more as something that might happen after Trump passes from the stage, but perhaps not before the left also has occasion to become election deniers anew.Report
Every time we have this discussion I mention that a good bit of the country already has early in person voting, usually starting at least 10 days before the election, some for far longer. This is done in red, blue, and purple states, so no obvious partisan angle to it. A map and summary of laws is here:
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/early-in-person-votingReport
Sure… no reason not to. I’d want to see better process controls over the rolls and who’s voted so far — not to mention a good system for pre-counting (or not pre-counting?) that has 0% chance of leaking prior to election day?
I’ve seen a suggestion that the following day should be ‘National Counting Day’ and I have a notion that it’s good in theory, but could see issues with leaky counts and an overwhelming need to predict the winner on exit polls alone… but hey, throw it in the mix.Report
Yea I throw it out there as the starting point of some kind of compromise. I have no idea how this works in other states, never having voted in one, but I’ve been doing early in person for years. It is the exact same experience as election day except no lines.
I could see agreeing to something along the lines of voting has to be in person, at a facility meeting certain minimum process and security standards, BUT you also have to maintain a minimum number of locations, meet some kind population based and geographic proximity requirements, and have a mandated minimum number of early voting days and (relatively long) operating hours. You can still have exceptions for exigencies but you can also put limits on what those are without fairly being accused of suppression. And maybe to your point there’s a rule that says votes are collected but nothing counted until day of. Not wedded to this particular concept but definitely open to ideas for making things less contentious.Report
In the best possible scenario it’s a national unity project which will get buy-in from the vast majority — even as it gores various oxen from place to place.
As I (too) often point out, when the various state systems are evaluated by experts for accuracy, security, and ease of use, the top few spots are dominated by western vote by mail states. Justify requiring those states to maintain a second poorer-performing parallel precinct system.Report
Sadly, Colorado is going through a rough patch right now.
(I still think that if we’re going to go electronic, we need to get Bally or IGT on it. They understand the cybersecurity part and have it nailed down flat.)Report
“Justify requiring those states to maintain a second poorer-performing parallel precinct system”
Fair enough… it solves for only one vector of a problem – how to make voting ubiquitous, easy and provide a secure audit trail.
It doesn’t solve for how do you provide a neutral and protected space to cast a vote.
You could, perhaps, double down on ubiquitous by removing some of the easy by requiring uploading some version of testing software that interacts with phones/cameras to prove that the Ballot is cast without interference. For example.
Again, I refer back to the DNC sponsored commercial… what if the worm turned and the DNC sponsered a commercial showing how women (or Men, pace InMD) are forced to fill out their mail-in ballot under the oppressive eye of their spouse. [or employer, or union, or precinct warden, or…]Report
My argument has always been that if such felonies are being committed on any sort of scale, it would show up in divorce filings. Or in labor complaints.Report
That isn’t how you build systems, though. If your failure mode is right there in the design, but it only fails catastrophically when it fails catastrophically, it still fails in exactly the way you designed it (and maybe in a couple ways you didn’t design).
As I mention in the first post… high trust/high collaboration is an assumption we should not take as baseline.Report
I have yet to see a clear convincing case for how you deal with this in low trust/low collaboration situations, especially since a sizable portion of the states and thus the electorate still has moderate to high trust in the existing processes. The people who have bought into election denial and voter fraud conspiracies under the current system won’t suddenly go back with national level Congressional intervention, even if it is to a secure option that is as secure or more so then now. Those people simply don’t want to deal with things as they are.Report
Things ‘as they are’ are inconsistent across 50 states.
Nothing matters for *this* election… I have no predictions or dire forecasts.
My position is longstanding and pre-dates 2020… I think the US ought to invest in a re-assessment of voting procedures to update some with modern conveniences while moderating others that are out of whack with design requirements (i.e. Neutral and Safe) and to help some states get out from under accretions of idiosyncratic voting regulations that can only be undone under a larger (bipartisan) umbrella.
It’s a project, not a response to any one particular thing.Report
That isn’t how you build systems, though. If your failure mode is right there in the design, but it only fails catastrophically when it fails catastrophically, it still fails in exactly the way you designed it (and maybe in a couple ways you didn’t design).
All voting systems have failure modes built in. Eg, in-person voting on election day is subject to weather, work and work-related schedules, and transportation problems. Probably the most common single fix used for all of those collectively — other than a full vote by mail system — is the permanent no-excuse mail ballot list.
If you want to argue that coerced voting is the bigger problem, offer some evidence.Report
On the one hand, Trump is claiming he already won Pennsylvania so is polling in the state must be bad. On the other hand, the Supreme Court gave a green light to Youngkin and others to purge voter rolls so stop the steal 2.0 is well underway.Report
If Harris wins, we will see much less intensity from the Broad Left on cultural issues–indeed, the reduced intensity from the Broad Left we’ve seen during the Biden Administration will continue, and the intensity we do see will be much less aligned with partisan politics.
One of the things that has always seemed glaringly obvious to me, but rarely commented upon, was how much of what Matt Y. calls the Great Awokening was anti-Trumpist counter-reaction. It ramped up around the time he elected and started petering off after he was out of office.
Regardless of what you think of “woke” positions at the object level [1], much of the embrace of them was being driven by the shock of Trump’s election, and the reasonable if not iron-clad belief it instilled in a lot of relatively sheltered white liberals and moderates that the country was a much more dangerously bigoted place than they had previously believed.
I recall a fair amount of frustration from the Further Left at liberals who were largely spurred to activism and political awareness by Trump treating racism, misogyny, and anti-LGBT hate as flowing from Trump, and saying things like, “I’d be eating brunch right now if I weren’t fighting Trump’s fascism!”
They started to chill out once Biden was elected, DEI initiatives started fizzling out, and culture war-driven boycotts started coming from conservatives who were enraged that trans people exist.
But re-elect a proud rapist to the Presidency, bringing a red-pilled Thiel ghoul along as his sidekick? After he’s spent the past year raving about vermin and poisoned blood and enemies within? After he’s promised mass deportations of millions of immigrants, including millions of legal immigrants, based on literal N@zi lies about black people eating pets?
Yeah, you’re gonna see some fishing counter-reaction.
On the other hand, electing Trump will do nothing and less than nothing to calm the right-wing culture war freakout. Hell, it will probably get worse–remember that QAnon was invented on Trump’s watch.
[1] I continue to believe it’s a mixed bag of good ideas, arrant but mostly harmless nonsense, and things that would be good ideas that have been watered down to nothing by consultants and entrepreneurs who want to make a buck selling them to Fortune 500 D suites.
[2] I wrote a bit of an OT piece about this called “Those Who Walk Away from Omelets”, but like most of my OT pieces it went nowhere.Report
Among the reasons to hope for a Harris win IMO is that it is much more likely to lead to a general lowering of the temperature.Report
That is an amazing essay title and I plan on stealing it.Report
“how much of what Matt Y. calls the Great Awokening was anti-Trumpist counter-reaction. ”
were you asleep from 2008-2016Report
I was not. Why do you ask?Report
I don’t think it took off before 2012 and that’s at the very early end.Report
Yeah most of the ideas were in the mix but Trump was the major accelerant.
Suburban “Resistance” groups also exposed a lot of people who ranged from “sorta liberal maybe” to “was a Republican 15 minutes ago” to concepts from the “woke” lexicon (especially privilege) who picked them up with surprising enthusiasm.Report
If I had to mark the real ‘shots fired’ moment it was the Obama admin’s Title IX Dear Colleague letter in 2011, which then took a while to percolate out into academia.* But I agree, that the election of Trump is what sent it all into overdrive. His persona and elevation to high office gives a kind of post hoc credence to all of these different theories.
*To be charitable to DD I could kind of see an argument that the real first event was the Duke Lacrosse scandal in 2006. If you think about it all of the elements were there: allegations of sexual violence, race, privilege, a paranoid bureaucracy primed to view events through a particular, totalizing narrative about the world. I would argue though that at the end of the day that was still pretty easy to compartmentalize.Report
There does seem to be an increased support among law and order policing in deep blue Democratic districts. More than a few recall for mayors and DAs deemed woke. One of the leading contenders for the Mayor’s Office in SF is running on basically pro-broken windows policing.Report
Cook County will have a new State’s Atty. next week. The current officeholder, who was elected as a reform candidate, chose not to run after reading the tea leaves.Report
There is a lot of research that the most consistently liberal people (socially and economically) are college-educated middle class or above professionals. AKA In This House Winemoms.
As far as I can tell, everyone in the world hates this fact because of various implicationsReport
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I’m not convinced that either of these would pass judicial review. Yes, the current Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, but they were on very solid Constitutional ground in doing so. Constitutional authorization for Congress to ban abortion nationwide is much more dubious. Some of the current Republican appointees might vote to uphold it in bad faith, but I think at least two are better than that.
“Codifying Roe v Wade” is just a dumb meme to drive low-info voters to the polls, and I can’t believe that so many people who ought to know better are taking it seriously. Under any plausible Court composition, such a law would be either superfluous or unenforceable. A Republican-appointed majority would strike it down because a) Congress doesn’t have the Constitutional authority, and b) they don’t like abortion, so they’re not going to ignore that fact and make a bad-faith ruling to uphold it. A Democratic-appointed majority would make a bad-faith ruling upholding it, but they’d also make a bad-faith ruling that there’s a constitutional right to abortion, rendering the law superfluous.Report