Somewhere in America...

Sit back and enjoy the spectacle

Somewhere in America, there exists a young Latino man who has only kissed a girl once. He barely graduated high school, and has been bumming around in community college since without a clue what to do with his life. Last week, he listened to Donald Trump on the Joe Rogan podcast. He laughed when he heard Trump talk about what wind turbines are doing to whales, and was taken in by the message that other countries have been ripping us off because our politicians are stupid people. His ballot came in the mail, and he let it sit on his kitchen island for a week, but just today decided to fill it in and leave it for the mailman.

Somewhere there is a woman who was in college when Dobbs was decided. She probably would’ve voted Democrat anyway in future elections, but the party couldn’t count on her to regularly show up at the polls before, until she was well into middle age. She’s read about Amber Nicole Thurman. They can count on her now.

There is a black family out there that has achieved a respectable middle-class life, something that its patriarch values more than most as he never knew his father and has seen half a dozen brothers and cousins end up in jail or hooked on drugs. He has a son and a daughter, and their whole lives he’s been telling them about how important it is to vote, and all that previous generations of black people had sacrificed to give them a voice. He never felt the need to say which party they should vote for. In his community, telling someone to vote was always implicitly understood as telling them to vote Democrat, because what kind of weird black person wouldn’t? His 21-year-old daughter is excited about helping elect the first black female president, but her younger brother feels inexplicably drawn to Trump, though he doesn’t know if he’ll ever have the stomach to tell his father who he voted for.

Somewhere in America there is an elderly couple that had drifted apart over the years. They only stayed together because they’re too old to find anyone else and moving out would be too much work. The relationship survived on inertia alone. So for years they would sit on the couch at night and silently watch movies together. When Trump began running for president, they started to occasionally turn to Fox News to see what was going on, perhaps because it was the easiest channel to get to. They were drawn in, and became passionate believers in every right-wing cause covered on Hannity, from trans in women sports to border invasions to deep state conspiracies to get Trump. They’d be into QAnon too, only that they still get most of their information from TV and are too old to go down internet rabbit holes. Suddenly, they find that the passion in their relationship is back, as they develop a common cause that brings them closer together. They think that the election might be stolen anyway, but are sure to show up in person on Tuesday so they can help make Trump’s victory too big to rig.

Somewhere in America, a lonely Taiwanese immigrant inherited some money as an only child, which she put into real estate in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She had been sexually assaulted while walking home from her job at the laundromat in the inner city when she was younger. When she ruminates about how she never got married, she thinks back to that moment and wonders whether that was why. During the Kavanaugh hearings, she was drawn to Christine Blasey Ford’s story, and couldn’t understand why anyone would lie about something like this. Suddenly, her identity as a woman and an immigrant were activated, and she is now a reliable Democrat voter.

Somewhere on Staten Island, a white woman had a similar experience. But she was always a little more extraverted which meant that she ended up getting married, and now has two sons. When she was sexually assaulted, then, she did not blame men, and considered the skin color of her attacker to be more salient. This is a Trump voter.

A nation is an imagined community, and most people like to think that their beliefs, prejudices, and aesthetics are shared by the majority of the public. Even self-styled “heretics” who pride themselves on adhering to an unpopular ideology hold that they are somehow channeling the true preferences of their fellow citizens. White nationalists believe that deep down most Americans are just as prejudiced as they are but too scared to be open about it, and socialists think that the vast majority of Americans would vote with them to soak the rich if they could stop being manipulated by Republican hucksters and move beyond their irrational bigotry.

For political partisans, events are seen through a tribal lens, and this is more true on matters of aesthetics than anything else. Were all those Kamala Coconut memes fun, even inspiring, or cringe? Did they have the feel of a relaxed backyard barbecue or getting called to the HR office? Were JD Vance’s comments about childless cat ladies forgivable flubs that got at something true regarding how hard it has become to raise children, or an ugly peak into a diseased soul that seeks to impose order on an unpredictable reality by controlling women?

As long as leaders have cared about public opinion, every dictatorship in history has claimed that it has the support of the people. Opponents of strongmen say that the masses are only cowed into submission, and would choose a different future if they could. In most times and places throughout history, public opinion has been a black box. Historians do things like try to estimate what percentage of the American public supported seceding from Great Britain, but they’re engaging in guess work.

Now, we have public opinion polling, and most importantly, elections. When the Dobbs decision came down in 2022, I thought it probably wouldn’t matter that much. The country was already polarized, and everyone was in one camp or the other. After a string of school shootings, Democrats sometimes believe that enough Americans are going to see the need for tougher gun laws to shake the political landscape. When some new story surrounding trans insanity pops up or the border seems like it’s getting out of control, Republicans likewise get excited and think this is going to make the difference in future elections. Everyone before Dobbs already knew that Republicans were the pro-life party and Democrats were pro-choice, so why should this issue in particular becoming more salient matter?

But even though MSNBC is equally appalled by pro-life policies and racist comments by Republicans, the public has made it clear that it considers the former much worse. Abortion has turned out to be in a category all its own in terms of electoral impacts. Americans have heard the arguments that Republicans make about late-term abortions being horrifying, and also Democrats saying that you need government to be nowhere near the gynecologist’s office. With regards to this issue, it’s now clear which side Americans believe poses a greater threat to the kind of country they want to live in. Elites and political activists must adjust accordingly, which is why even a number of red states are about to vote to protect the right to choose and the anti-IVF movement has been stopped dead in its tracks.

The point of democracy is not that it always makes correct or wise decisions. Rather, its main strength is in that it gives us processes to ensure the peaceful transfer of power. Less appreciated is how it informs each individual where he stands in relation to his fellow citizens. Do you believe that women should be locked in the kitchen and removed from public life? Or that America is a white nation and minorities don’t belong? Or that the entire economic system is rigged, and private business needs to be expropriated so its resources can be redistributed to the poor? In a dictatorship, people hold on to all kinds of crazy ideas that they can delude themselves into believing are shared by the majority of their fellow citizens. Sure, opinion polling exists, and it can give you a rough estimate of where a country is at on certain issues, but most people have no idea how polling works, and the release of survey results aren’t large public events, open to every non-felon adult in the country and legitimized by the participation of more than half of those eligible. You might not like the kinds of politicians who end up winning elections, but — between presidential contests every four years, and midterm and off-year elections in between — the theocrats, the open bigots, the communists, and the worst haters we have in society are constantly being reminded that they are the minority, and most people want something else. There is value in that. MAGA election denial has the potential to deprive us of that gift, but I expect Republicans to go back to being somewhat normal about this topic once Trump is gone.

To many rightists, there is something deeply unappealing about the ignorant masses deciding who gets to rule. Trump gets on stage in Michigan with Muslim community leaders, who seem to be completely unaware of his first term record on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, at the same time that the most ethnocentric Jews look forward to him coming back into office so Bibi can have a free hand to finish the job. RFK says Trump will take on the corporations and Make America Healthy Again, as he ends up on the same side as food industry and corporate lobbyists who want government to get off the backs of business.

People disgusted with public opinion should rest easy, because in the end elites are the ones actually in charge, with swing state voters being called upon to occasionally decide between rival blocs of the ruling class. Having good elites is therefore more important than a public with rational political views. But to be allowed to rule, elites must humble themselves before the voter.

Elon Musk has therefore spent the last several months taking time away from building rockets and instead thinking about how to get brain dead schlubs in rural Pennsylvania off their asses long enough to color in a circle with a pen. The Harris campaign is thinking about how to do the same for the Philadelphia ghetto, as Republicans consider what kinds of commercials they can run and which podcasts Trump can go on to peel off enough men from that community to make a difference. The vast majority of the voters of whichever candidate wins won’t be paying all that much attention to the policy choices of the next administration, but they’ll be back in four years to go through the whole process again.

I am just grateful that we all get to experience this together. Your next leader will be determined by Graham Hancock Netflix special watchers, anti-vaxx RFK enthusiasts who believe government is hiding the benefits of exercise from you, feminist scholars suffering anxiety under the regime of American “rape culture,” women who failed out of their gender studies programs but still in their hearts aspire to elite status, Pentecostal preachers using numerology to establish to their flock that Trump is our new Cyrus the Great, the Wall Street banker who viscerally dislikes Kamala but was freaked out enough by a Bloomberg analysis of the effects of Trump’s tariffs to reluctantly support her, obese Appalachian rednecks too dejected by life to get excited about much until the topic of Mexican immigrants or Chinese taking their imaginary jobs comes up, Orthodox Jews seeking a greater Israel and Muslim preachers supporting the same candidate as them because they prioritize misogynistic vibes over all else, the Swifties who like wearing sun dresses but were radicalized by attacks on abortion. People whose lives turned around because they listened to Jordan Peterson and cleaned their rooms, detransitioners who have come out of the craziness of the 2010s in a physically diminished state but with more conservative political sensibilities, women who drink red wine at night and get lost in Maddow’s monologues as they seek a reprieve from their monotonous office jobs and the incel who knows he’s going to die alone but sees Trump as the only chance he’ll ever have to get revenge on those who he blames for his miserable existence, especially that Maddow watcher he once had a brief interaction with, which he still seethes over even as she has never given him a second thought.

All of these people are now lining up into one of two tribes, and at the end of this process we’re going to see which side is larger, and more importantly which side has the right distribution of support to come to power under the rules of the electoral college. Millions will be elated and millions will be crushed, for reasons that span the range from sensible understandings of what was at stake to fears that are completely disconnected from reality.

Be thankful that you live in a healthy, thriving democracy. No dictator could ever produce a spectacle this entertaining.