Flip This House

 

I went to bed with the 2024 election undecided, though I knew the outcome. One of the first pieces of media I consumed at 4:47 am featured MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid earlier in the night mid-cope & flabbergasted, calling the campaign Harris ran "flawless" and pointing out that she even got the endorsement of Queen Latifah. My word! You don't say! 

If I could boil down everything wrong with the Democratic Party establishment and their associated elites, add pigments and thinning agent to paint a picture like bald Bob Ross, I wouldn't come close to depicting what Reid did that night.

I have made no effort to hide that I voted for Kamala Harris. And I have no qualms with that decision. Even the friendliest polls for Donald Trump did not predict the sheer magnitude of this outcome. So, to perform a competent postmortem, one must point out the painfully obvious. My lens is probably irrelevant to most - an apostate Republican clinging to an idea of conservatism that no longer exists. I voted for Harris because that's my belief system, not in spite of it. I'm no populist, or nationalist. The health and prosperity of the Republic supersedes everything because the health and prosperity of my daughters means everything.  

One of the founding philosophical fathers of conservatism, Edmund Burke, is quoted as saying: "Do not despair, but if you do, work on in despair." I'm going to add "and stop fucking whining," because whining isn't going to change the power structure of the Democratic Party or explain why nearly every key demographic drifted rightward, in some cases emphatically. Trump won Passaic County in New Jersey, for fucks sake. Instead of sharing the suicide hotline so you can virtue signal your empathy, it's time to start building a coalition based on shared principles. Instead of Harvard canceling classes so students can weep and grieve, perhaps they should be in their seats preparing for the real, cruel world. 

"You're a straight, white man! You can't possibly understand how devastating this is!" Can't I? I've been shouting about the danger Donald Trump poses for nearly a decade because I understand what this means for marginalized people. And guess what? Everyone gets to talk, now. You need people who give a shit. Because identity politics is what partially got us here in the first place. I have two young daughters - I have skin in the game. 

Predictably, Democratic strategists and commentators quickly framed this election as a "resurgence of white supremacy" and "deep seeded misogyny." The fuck it is. Trump gained in urban areas, suburban areas, non-white areas, with senior voters, with black [male] voters, Hispanic voters; with the educated, the uneducated. Trump did not gain with white voters. He even gained with 18-34 year old's. The red/blue bar charts on this data should burn your retinas (and about that data - it's not final - these figures are somewhat accurate but will be revised in the coming weeks). The only reliable segment of the Democratic base is black women, who get out there and vote for Democrats every damn time. Maybe listen to them a bit more than white progressive "allies." 

Joe Biden, still the incumbent president, had to wade through explosive, inevitable inflation. His unpopularity the day he left the race was staggering. That unpopularity didn't dissipate; it simply stuck to Kamala Harris like the Venom suit. Forget that the US experienced less inflation than anywhere else in the world, or recovered faster and stronger. Inflation happened. It wasn't Trump's fault or Biden's fault, even if both exacerbated the issue. It's economics. 

Biden and his inner circle inexplicably ignored the obvious by failing to drop out or resign much sooner. The obvious being his physical and mental deterioration. This did two things - it gave Harris mere months to mount a capable campaign and it made it impossible for her to distance herself from his unpopularity. Harris was done a great disservice. Biden is the Democrats' Hindenburg. 

Making matters worse, Kamala Harris is a poor candidate and probably never should have been selected for Vice President. Once again, the party that coronated Hillary Clinton got cute. This is not a contradictory tone for me on Harris. Some people are not cut out for running for President, let alone being president. She dropped out of the 2019-2020 primary season before Julian Castro and John Delaney (!!!). She was not a popular candidate, and the biggest mark she made on the primary was suggesting Biden was mildly racist. She has a limited record of electoral success. She won three statewide races in a dark blue state, one of them by less than a percentage point. Gretchen Whitmer, Ruben Gallego, Josh Shapiro, and Andy Beshear are battleground-state Democrats who win elections. But Democratic leaders think they're smarter than everyone else, which is why Gavin Newsom is being bandied about by these political imps. 

Fast forward to 2024, and Harris faced no primary pressure, meaning any flaws she may have would not be appropriately exposed as the entire party scurried to rally around her. If Biden resigned in 2022, would Kamala Harris have won the Democratic primaries? Kudos to her for giving it a go. She did the best she could under the circumstances. I wanted her to win. The conspiracist in me thinks Pelosi/Schumer/Biden scheming chose her as a sacrificial lamb to protect the Democrats mentioned above. 

When Democrats aren't coronating candidates, they're carefully curating that candidate's image. Everything must be scripted. People don't relate with candidates that act like this. Donald Trump went to McDonalds and gooned around in a garbage truck like a big wet baby. Every other day he was doing interviews, and no matter how rancid or repugnant those appearances were, he was there. Kamala Harris preened on stage with Beyoncé. Instead of doing Joe Rogan, she made time to do SNL. Tight script. No gaffes. It's political bubble wrap. 

Harris didn't lose because she didn't appear on Joe Rogan, or because Tim Walz didn't do Bartstool. They should have, of course. But part of why she lost is because she can't do these shows. It's unscripted. It's unsafe. And Democrats, Harris in particular, are terrible when they do media appearances raw. See: View, The. And of course they took into account the "How dare she platform Joe Rogan!" tropes that looney tunes leftists would shriek. Because we must pander to white progressives.

Tim Walz, man. Look, he seems like a nice guy and a great asset to his state. But he is a blue state governor who presided over some seriously destructive & unpopular protests. This is not the candidate to fortify the blue wall. He's kind of a goofball. And speaking of walls, Donald Trump brags about building them, and he tore this one down. Maybe it was always destined to crumble. But Walz didn't help. Walls. 

People like Bernie Sanders alleged that Democrats "abandoned" the working class. No, you old idiot. Joe Biden specifically prioritized legislation for projects that directly benefited the working class. He rescued the Teamsters in a pension crisis, and went heavy on industrial policy. It never broke through because Democrats message like shit. Being unable to relate or talk to the working class isn't the same as abandoning them. Sherrod Brown has been Ohio's Senator for 17 years. He's an old school, moderate, labor rights guy who fights for the working man. He lost to a car salesman who has been sued for wage theft. 

The people of Missouri voted for abortion and against the candidates that want to preserve the right to choose. Prop 36 in California, which increases penalties for repeated thefts and certain gun crimes, won with 70% of the vote. Harris refused to endorse that measure despite her well-known prosecutorial record, and she underperformed the proposition. In deep-red Florida, 57% of the population voted to secure abortion rights, despite the governor threatening media that platformed the initiative. 

Does any of this add up? 

What else? Oh - hOw diD tRuMp gAiN iN pLaCeS LiKe qUeEns? He gained double digits in Manhattan, the Bronx, and the aforementioned Queens. The blue areas of Staten Island were pushed so far north it's basically Richmond Terrace or bust. Leadership in big cities is almost exclusively Democrat and in New York, for example, it's so far left it arrives on the other side. So when people were reading about some guy slamming his own shit into a woman's face or yeeting a college kid onto train tracks, the New York City Council was banning the sale of guinea pigs and regulating yoga mat rentals. When recidivists were assaulting people at random or murdering one another in broad daylight, the City Council was banning car wash soaps and foie gras. When the MTA continued to blow billions of dollars, taxpayers faced rate hikes and new tolls. The Manhattan DA is prosecuting a guy who choked a homeless man to near-death and the defense has been parading in witnesses expressing gratitude for his intervention. The prosecutor keeps referring to the defendant as "the white man." Tell me you never speak to rank & file New Yorkers without saying so. The disconnect here is so broad I struggle to understand how these politicians gained power.

Forget that crime in New York City is down, or that these anecdotal cases received disproportionate coverage that distorted actual patterns. People see what they see. People fear what they fear. Not everyone is very online. 

It should make your skin crawl that Donald Trump is inheriting near-Goldilocks economic conditions and in February everyone complaining about the price of eggs will suddenly think everything is better. The Fed cut interest rates today, and that will keep happening. It's going to grind your gears when Benjamin Netanyahu stops pulverizing Gaza after painstakingly blitzing that area for the second half of Biden's term. Trump fans (not voters, fans) do not know how to lose, and they certainly do not know how to win. Trump's victory will be evident for years. The weight of it will be intolerable and the path back to electoral success will be arduous. We don't know how destructive the second Trump administration will be. It's a known-unknown. Despite my tone here, I have a real, tangible fear of what may happen to peaceful immigrants who contribute immensely to our economy. They don't deserve what's potentially coming. 

I don't operate on separate systems of morality or economic theory than Trump voters. I operate with a different set of facts. If Democrats think they can paint 75 million people as crypto fascists, they'll never win another election. But you can target and highlight their poor decision-making. Trump will expose this country to a number of risks. He's unhinged with foreign policy. He will drive budget deficits upward. Tariffs will drive the cost of every day goods up dramatically. Programs that offer healthcare to the poor or elderly will be cut back. Abortion rights will be restricted. Law-abiding immigrants will likely be ripped from their homes in bloody raids. None of it is good. 

Instead of pointing fingers at Hispanic men or Palestinian sympathizers, or at white supremacy, incels, and sexists, and instead of demanding ideological purity, let’s focus on dismantling the establishment within the Democratic Party and expanding the tent. Root out its decision-makers and power brokers, its strategists and elites, and its loyal media alliances. Only then can we possibly make America whole again. I say 'we' because right-wing populist nationalism has never been my preference, and I have no interest in becoming a Democrat. Someone has to vote against right-wing extremists in the primaries, so it may as well be me.