A time to tear down, a time to build
Donald Trump has won his second presidential term. What does this mean—for us as individuals, for our country, and for the world? Today is the third in a series of reflections on the revelations of this election season and the new moment it has ushered in. (We invite you to read the first and second installments as well)
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Community is the priority
In the end, the Democrats just weren’t weird enough. When seventy-three percent of voters are “dissatisfied” or “angry” regarding the state of the country, expressions of joy feel like endorsements of complacency. Worries about inflation and immigration—the concerns that overshadowed voters’ decisions—have something in common: Both reveal discomfort with rapid change in daily life. When you feel like you’re hurtling into the unknown, slogans about moving “forward” are likely to exacerbate your motion sickness.
Americans in 2024 are, by the obvious measures, living in peace and prosperity. But we are rattled, weary of disruptions, aware in an unexpectedly raw and unbuffered way of a perennial feature of human experience that we have often been able to ignore—that wherever we live in this world, we are sojourners, passers-through, with moving scenery always slipping by. Travelers need companions in the way, and it may be that what has been called our loneliness epidemic is so acute because our nervous anticipation of one unsettling shift after another makes the flimsiness of our connections with one another harder to bear than it might be in calmer circumstances.
Tim Walz was right to suggest that tending to the commonweal requires forbearance and restraint, the wisdom to know when it’s time to “mind your own damn business.” But it was unfortunate that he left unspoken the premise on which his catchphrase depends. Minding your business is not an end in itself or a rule for every occasion. The proper aim and shape of politics—of the recognition of rights or the provision of care or the policing of boundaries—is the cultivation of a neighborly society, a humane community. Community is the priority. In a country as suffused with individualism as is ours, how weird it would seem to say that out loud.
Geoffrey Kurtz teaches political science and urban studies a Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). His recent essays have appeared in Front Porch Republic and Public Seminar.
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It’s incredible
When it became clear Trump won, some analysts rushed to explain the outcome as a rational choice by voters in terms of economics or dislike of elite condescension. Democrats do bear partial blame for both of Trump’s presidential victories by fielding the candidates and campaigns they did.
But that Trump won because voters mostly worried about their wallets is not credible. If voters really were motivated by interest in economics—or by nearly any other substantive issue, like foreign policy, abortion, woke curricula, complexities of immigration—they could have backed a different Republican. If policies really were the priority, voters could have picked another candidate with more experience and credibility and with less nasty baggage—De Santis, Haley, Christie, etc. But the primaries did not yield a different candidate to enact Trump-era GOP policies. They gave us Trump. Voters approved Trump, thus approving both the sentiments to which Trump gives voice and the permission Trump gives them in turn to voice their own versions of resentment, irreverence, iconoclasm.
Also, it is not credible to count the anger expressed in a Trump vote as a blast against elites. Trump is elite. He throws around money conspicuously and gets support from others who do, Elon not least of these. Regular Americans seek out elites’ opinions all the time—what music to listen to or shows to watch, what size lips or hips should be, what to buy kids for Christmas, what to eat during bowl games. Beyond the market, where consumers are encouraged to claim agency because they get to make choices, ordinary people also defer to others whose knowledge and credentialing they need—elites!—because it is superior—like when they break a bone or board a plane or watch a hurricane or need glasses.
Finally, it is not credible that Trump won because the electorate moved right. What does that right even mean? The move was not “right” but closer to Trump. The two-party system was a great American institution for a while, helping hold off armed conflict in the nineteenth century by prioritizing party over section or personality. The currently victorious GOP is a zombie party. Trump has slain it, eviscerated it, and refilled it with other material. Republicans who worried about election fraud might have directed elsewhere their worries of fraud.
After votes came in, the Wall Street Journal asked, “How Did Donald Trump Win the Race?” A front page article answered the question by naming 2024 “The Economy-Is-Everything Election.” But the headline just above is more candid: he won by “Being Donald Trump.”
Agnes R. Howard teaches in Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University, and is author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human. She is a Contributing Editor for Current.
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Surprise!
If online commentary is any guide, the outcome of this election was unexpected and incomprehensible to a large portion of the American electorate. Because our politics has driven us largely into two camps with little overlap and little non-hostile engagement, many operate with poorly conceived mental models of what someone on the “other” side is like. If we hope to move into a healthier era of American politics, I expect that those of us who cannot comprehend why their neighbors voted as they did must begin the long process of getting to know them so as to understand their concerns.
The particular issues that divide us are the stuff of headlines, and I don’t need to rehash them. Still, I want to call my friends on the left to try and understand those who voted differently. They will undoubtedly respond that those voting for Trump are operating in a sort of alternate reality, one dominated by false narratives, by conspiracies about politics, history, Democrats, and more. I often share their concerns. But those same friends often seem blind to the concerns that in turn motivate their friends, family, and neighbors to support a president who promises the kind of peace and stability that our president-elect has promised. Whether or not he can make good on those promises is fair to doubt, but what makes those promises appealing is, I think, understandable for those who take the time to listen. Likewise, the things that prevented many of us from supporting Trump should be understandable to those who can be receptive to concerns, even those coming from their own camp. That we do not yet share this understanding is lamentable, but we should not despair.
Philip D. Bunn is an assistant professor of political science at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. His research has been published in Political Research Quarterly and American Political Thought, and his reviews and essays have appeared in The Review of Politics, Plough Quarterly, Current, and The University Bookman.
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The hope of an immigrant
Since becoming an American citizen in 2015, I have had the privilege of voting in three presidential elections. In each one, I have cast my ballot out of duty rather than because I was eager to support either of the major party candidates. The 2024 election was, in some ways, especially troubling. Neither the formal debates, nor the campaign ads offered more than vacuous rhetoric and simplistic generalities. The arguments were too often ad hominem. It was hard to trust even the media outlooks that purported to be evenhanded. I had friends from both parties who were equally convinced of the malicious intent of the other side, and equally certain of the disastrous potential of the other side winning. Post-election, the two sides are correspondingly elated or devastated. Thoughtful friends on either side have professed utter astonishment that any intelligent and morally serious citizen could possibly have voted for “the other candidate.”
In short, the yawning gap between the demands for statesmanship, character, wisdom, and experience of an American president in this moment of history and the options on the ballot was downright depressing. One might be excused for falling into despair or cynicism about the American experiment.
In the middle of post-election doldrums, I was arrested in my thinking by the vivid recollection of the moment in the Theodore Roosevelt House on that February day in 2015 when thirty-five individuals from around the world—from diverse religions, nationalities, and ethnicities—gathered with supportive and often tearful family members, to take their oath of allegiance to the United States of America. I am not a sentimental person, but as I recall that day, I am once again humbled by the privilege of citizenship and convicted by the responsibility to continue to invest in whatever real opportunities I have—and on behalf of the particular individuals that come into my pathway—to realize the hope that still drives thousands of people to our borders.
Shirley A. Mullen (PhD) is President Emerita of Houghton College and longtime history professor. She is a Contributing Editor for Current.
Agnes Howard thinks that “if voters really were motivated by interest in economics” then the “voters could have picked another candidate with more experience and credibility and with less nasty baggage.” Instead, “they gave us Trump..”
This misunderstands the differences between who turns out during a primary election, and who comes out in a general election. You can’t simply ascribe the priorities and motives of the former to the latter. The Republican Party choseTrump as their candidate for several reasons, almost all of them reprehensible, but one was at least understandable–as the “incumbent” leader of the party who had won the White House before, he seemed like he had the best chance of winning.
At that point, he became the alternative to the administration that’s been in power for the last four years. The election was a referendum on that administration, and as such, when voters chose the alternative, they got Trump. As Jon Schaff reminds us elsewhere, that they voted for Trump doen’t always mean they were voting for what he will do in every specific. I suspect there will be a lot of buyer’s remorse soon, unless Trump can demagogue his way out of it (a possibility).
Our election is no different than any of those in any other advanced democracy the past year, from the UK to Japan and in-between. Left, right, center, if they were incumbents, they lost. It’s a mistake to think the election is a reflection of voters loving everything about the candidates they voted for.