I'm writing this at 9AM Pacific standard time on November 6, the morning after the election. Not all the dust has quite settled yet, but two things are clear: Donald Trump has won, and the Republicans have taken control of the Senate. The House is still a toss-up, and it's still unclear whether Trump will win the popular vote, but the last time I looked at the numbers he had a pretty commanding lead.
From my political perspective this is about as bad an outcome as I could have imagined, but from my perspective as an American citizen it could have been a whole lot worse. The scenario I really dreaded was a replay of Bush v Gore, with Trump winning because three Supreme Court justices he appointed put their thumbs on the scale for him. That didn't happen. In fact, none of the truly nightmarish predictions came to pass. There was no widespread chaos or efforts to disrupt the election, just one (AFAIK) random act of arson. There was no mass suppression of votes. None of the outcomes turned on any court decisions. There was no armed insurrection. There was no widespread AI-backed misinformation campaign, just more of the same run-of-the-mill falsehoods that have become part and parcel of the Trump brand. There will be no second Civil War, just a peaceful transfer of power on January 20.
It was, on the whole, a good day for democracy.
Don't get me wrong, I still think this is a bad outcome, and I predict it will ultimately prove to be catastrophic. There are some who believe in democracy because they think it produces good outcomes. I am not one of those people. The point of democracy IMO is not that it produces good outcomes -- it often doesn't. The point of democracy is that it, like the rule of law itself, provides a non-violent mechanism for resolving disputes. And this time around it's going to work. The problem is, I predict, that we are now going to learn the hard way that running a country is not actually such an easy thing to do, and Donald Trump is not quite as smart as he has portrayed himself to be. He wasn't up to the task the last time, and I see no reason to think he's going to do any better this time. We're going to have a peaceful transition of power on January 20. Some time after that -- not right away, but certainly before 2028 -- we're going to have chaos and catastrophe.
Part of me hopes that the Republicans will take control of the House, not because I expect that will make things any better (it won't) but because it will make it that much harder for the Republicans to deny responsibility for the disaster they are about to create. If we're going to do this experiment, let's fucking do it right and eliminate all the confounding factors. It will cost more, but at least we won't need to argue about whether things are bad because we didn't go MAGA enough.
Specifically what will go wrong and when I cannot say. One easy prediction is that if Trump actually follows through with his promise to impose import tariffs, we will see a resurgence of inflation. That much is a no-brainer. Whether Trump will actually be stupid enough to do this remains to be seen. The main reason he's returning to the White House now is because inflation hit a high of 9.1% in 2022 in the wake of the pandemic. His promised tariffs will produce much steeper price increases than that. God only knows if that will be enough to make his supporters turn on him.
But if high inflation turns out to be the worst of the fallout from a second Trump administration we will be very, very lucky. There is so much more at stake. Taiwan. Ukraine. The Balkans (and the rest of eastern Europe). Gaza (and the rest of the middle-east). NATO. Climate change -- this election has probably squandered our last hope to limit carbon emissions to non-civilization-ending levels, though that won't become apparent for quite a while yet. And then there is the very exclusive anguish you are going to experience if you are dark-skinned, or gay, or Muslim, or female.
It's going to be bad.
Will we be able to recover from this? I don't know. Frankly, I wouldn't bet my life savings on it. It's going to be very, very hard, and very, very painful, and take a very, very long time. It's going to require a lot of people on the left to let go of some very cherished ideas, like that the only way Donald Trump could possibly win would be to cheat. He didn't. He won fair and square. That is the reality we have to face.
POSTSCRIPT: I was a little surprised to see someone other than Publius posting comments on my last two posts. It has been a long time since that has happened, and I was beginning to think that I was playing to an empty house (well, not quite empty, but it's more than a little disheartening when it seems like your audience consists of a single heckler). So if you've been lurking, and you've been getting some value from what I write, please let me know either by leaving a comment or dropping me a line. It's getting harder and harder to find a reason to keep doing this. My opportunity costs are high, and writing a blog entry takes a non-trivial amount of time. I wrote this because I needed to blow off some steam, and I wanted to get my position on the election results on the record while they were still fresh in my mind. Whether I keep doing this in the future is now very much an open question. I have never tried to monetize my writing. My only reward is the knowledge that someone out there got some value out of it, and that's enough for me. Most of the time I can sustain myself on faith, but every now and then I need actual data, and this day more than usual.
