Fareed: Democrats Blew It With 3 Big Mistakes
Friday, November 08, 2024 - Filed in: General Interest
Incumbents have been trounced worldwide in this global year of elections, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, but Kamala Harris had a chance to buck that trend. The US economy is faring better than many others, and Donald Trump had monumental weaknesses as a candidate.Democrats made three mistakes, Fareed writes. One was to not take immigration and illegal border crossings more seriously. The flurry of criminal cases against Trump felt like a pile-on. The final mistake, Fareed writes, was broader: allowing identity politics to dominate.“The problem is much deeper than simply one about nouns and pronouns,” Fareed writes. “The entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal—judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Similarly, university speech codes and cancel culture have become ways that the left censored or restricted that most cherished of liberal ideas, freedom of speech. One simple way to think about the lessons of this election is that liberals cannot achieve liberal goals—however virtuous—by illiberal means.”
A Worldwide Anti-Incumbent Wave
Much of the democratic world has been voting in 2024, which the Economist dubbed “the biggest election year in history.” Incumbents have been losing all over, notes Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch.
The trend has crossed left-right politics, ensnaring conservatives too. Burn-Murdoch writes: “From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, [Emmanuel] Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year. The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.”
The Autopsy Continues
As analysts ponder what went wrong for Harris, some say Democrats held basic misperceptions about voters.
“[T]heir optimism was a sign of how badly the Harris campaign misread an electorate that was more wound up about inflation and immigration than about Trump’s character,” The Wall Street Journal’s Tarini Parti, Annie Linskey and Ken Thomas write. “Trump punched his return ticket to the White House with a stunning electoral romp that batted away Harris’s attacks and lured voters who believed the country was on the wrong track and blamed President Biden, Harris’s deeply unpopular boss. Her inability to separate herself from him and offer her own specific solutions to Americans’ problems, despite a lavish campaign war chest, was a central reason for her loss.”
A common complaint being lodged at Democrats is that they underappreciated economic angst. Le Monde’s Piotr Smolar writes, “When Harris spoke of the need to reconcile the country, wearied by the chaos of the Trump era, she overlooked another priority for the majority of the population: expressing dissatisfaction with the direction the country had taken. Violent loss of purchasing power, shifting identity markers, the immigration question, rejection of costly and endless military adventures abroad, even by proxy: all these coalesced into a desire for change.” At Politico, Christopher Cadelago and Holly Otterbein write: “Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability—his stewardship over the economy—nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.”
On the topic of incumbency, Democrats’ entrenchment in electoral success in recent decades probably worked against them, David Wallace-Wells argues in The New York Times, noting: “The Democratic Party has held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years and was fighting to make it 16 of 20. The one Republican interloper in that time styled himself as an outsider and then governed like one, unable to achieve very much legislatively, however many judges he appointed and however much informational and social chaos he sowed in the country. No Republican, including Trump, had won the popular vote in a presidential election since the Great Recession of 2008, and only one had won the national vote since 1992, after the end of the Cold War—a period of 32 years in which Democrats had secured more supporters in seven of the past eight presidential elections.” This has fed a “longer-term perception that liberals constituted the country’s ruling class.”
Others say President Joe Biden stayed in the race far too long—and that Harris faced a tough situation. Jim Newell writes for Slate: “Your mileage may vary, but I find it difficult to be too upset with Harris. She was thrust into an impossible situation: facing extraordinary headwinds on the economy and the border and inheriting the administration’s unpopularity without having been the decisionmaker. Having to define herself—and avoid being defined by Trump—in 90 days. Remaining loyal to Biden while trying to keep her distance. Having to take the weight of the future of the world on her shoulders. And having to persuade a country that has never elected a Black woman as president, or a woman at all, to elect her. You can’t blame her for a lack of trying.”
A Blow to Liberal Democracy
Trump has been viewed as a global standard-bearer for illiberal right-wing populism—the style of governing, used for example by Trump ally and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in which traditional checks and balances are discarded to achieve conservative goals. In a Financial Times essay, noted political theorist Francis Fukuyama writes that liberal democracy suffered a blow with Trump’s win.
Democrats may have sounded alarms about Trump and democracy, Fukuyama writes, but “the vast majority of working-class voters simply did not care about the threat to the liberal order, both domestic and international, posed specifically by Trump.”
As for why, Fukuyama writes that classical liberalism has been undermined by two later forms: neoliberalism, in which markets are held sacrosanct and government economic intervention demonized, and “what one might call ‘woke liberalism’, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups.” On Persuasion’s The Good Fight podcast with Yascha Mounk, Fukuyama argues that American voters have returned to class interests and that “this whole interpretation of the centrality of race is just not right.”
What Trump’s Win Means for Ukraine
Donald Trump has boasted that he could end the Ukraine war in a day. He has also suggested Ukraine should have made a deal with Russia earlier in the conflict. That has led Ukraine’s Western supporters to worry that Trump would force a lopsided war settlement favoring Russia. Curiously, Elon Musk joined Trump’s post-election call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, adding to the mystery of where this is all heading.
So, now that Trump has won, what will happen? Trumpist Republicans blocked extending aid to Ukraine last year, and Rajan Menon writes for the left-leaning British magazine The New Statesman that “what Ukraine needs on the battlefield above all is weaponry. And European countries, partly because of their decades-long underinvestment in defence … would not be able to fill the gap should Trump taper, let alone end, the American arms supply.” At the same magazine, Andrew Marr warns: “There will be demands in London for European countries, particularly Britain, to take the lead in fresh military moves to protect Ukraine, urgently sending more long-range missiles and allowing the targeting of Russian sites. But without US support, this becomes incredibly dangerous for western Europe. Of all the urgent debates coming now, this is the most urgent one of all. There are no good answers. Unless he dramatically changes his mind, a Trump-imposed settlement, giving Putin the eastern third of Ukraine, would surely result in the fall of Zelensky, further Russian advances, and then Russian—and now North Korean—troops pushing against Nato’s borders.”
At the same time, some non-MAGA, non-isolationist foreign-policy thinkers have backed the idea of negotiating with Moscow. “Number one, you have to be talking to the Russians while you're [helping Ukraine],” George Beebe, who formerly directed the CIA’s Russia analysis and worked as an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney, said in a recent panel discussion hosted by the Quincy Institute, a think tank broadly representing a left-leaning foreign policy that opposes US overseas military entanglements. “Right now, we’re really not. So this needs to be done in the context of communications so that you’re explaining to the Russians what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and indicating to them that we’re not going to stop providing this aid absent concessions on Russia’s part.”
Others argue Trump’s pride and patriotism will be good for Ukraine. Before Trump’s win, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Fareed on GPS: “I cannot believe that a guy who is so passionate about his country, about making America great again … would want to kick off his next presidential term by basically allowing the Soviet empire to be great again.” As Politico’s Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing reports, former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggests Trump’s “desire to be a winner” could lead him to keep up support for Kyiv. At the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Piotr Andrusieczko (readable in English on Worldcrunch, a site that translates articles) quotes Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the Kyiv-based think tank the New Europe Center, as saying: “The more we became frustrated with Joe Biden and his administration, the less fear we had over Donald Trump's potential return to the White House. And two of Trump’s negative traits, unpredictability and vanity, could under certain circumstances work to Ukraine’s benefit.”
Much of the democratic world has been voting in 2024, which the Economist dubbed “the biggest election year in history.” Incumbents have been losing all over, notes Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch.
The trend has crossed left-right politics, ensnaring conservatives too. Burn-Murdoch writes: “From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, [Emmanuel] Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year. The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.”
The Autopsy Continues
As analysts ponder what went wrong for Harris, some say Democrats held basic misperceptions about voters.
“[T]heir optimism was a sign of how badly the Harris campaign misread an electorate that was more wound up about inflation and immigration than about Trump’s character,” The Wall Street Journal’s Tarini Parti, Annie Linskey and Ken Thomas write. “Trump punched his return ticket to the White House with a stunning electoral romp that batted away Harris’s attacks and lured voters who believed the country was on the wrong track and blamed President Biden, Harris’s deeply unpopular boss. Her inability to separate herself from him and offer her own specific solutions to Americans’ problems, despite a lavish campaign war chest, was a central reason for her loss.”
A common complaint being lodged at Democrats is that they underappreciated economic angst. Le Monde’s Piotr Smolar writes, “When Harris spoke of the need to reconcile the country, wearied by the chaos of the Trump era, she overlooked another priority for the majority of the population: expressing dissatisfaction with the direction the country had taken. Violent loss of purchasing power, shifting identity markers, the immigration question, rejection of costly and endless military adventures abroad, even by proxy: all these coalesced into a desire for change.” At Politico, Christopher Cadelago and Holly Otterbein write: “Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability—his stewardship over the economy—nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.”
On the topic of incumbency, Democrats’ entrenchment in electoral success in recent decades probably worked against them, David Wallace-Wells argues in The New York Times, noting: “The Democratic Party has held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years and was fighting to make it 16 of 20. The one Republican interloper in that time styled himself as an outsider and then governed like one, unable to achieve very much legislatively, however many judges he appointed and however much informational and social chaos he sowed in the country. No Republican, including Trump, had won the popular vote in a presidential election since the Great Recession of 2008, and only one had won the national vote since 1992, after the end of the Cold War—a period of 32 years in which Democrats had secured more supporters in seven of the past eight presidential elections.” This has fed a “longer-term perception that liberals constituted the country’s ruling class.”
Others say President Joe Biden stayed in the race far too long—and that Harris faced a tough situation. Jim Newell writes for Slate: “Your mileage may vary, but I find it difficult to be too upset with Harris. She was thrust into an impossible situation: facing extraordinary headwinds on the economy and the border and inheriting the administration’s unpopularity without having been the decisionmaker. Having to define herself—and avoid being defined by Trump—in 90 days. Remaining loyal to Biden while trying to keep her distance. Having to take the weight of the future of the world on her shoulders. And having to persuade a country that has never elected a Black woman as president, or a woman at all, to elect her. You can’t blame her for a lack of trying.”
A Blow to Liberal Democracy
Trump has been viewed as a global standard-bearer for illiberal right-wing populism—the style of governing, used for example by Trump ally and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in which traditional checks and balances are discarded to achieve conservative goals. In a Financial Times essay, noted political theorist Francis Fukuyama writes that liberal democracy suffered a blow with Trump’s win.
Democrats may have sounded alarms about Trump and democracy, Fukuyama writes, but “the vast majority of working-class voters simply did not care about the threat to the liberal order, both domestic and international, posed specifically by Trump.”
As for why, Fukuyama writes that classical liberalism has been undermined by two later forms: neoliberalism, in which markets are held sacrosanct and government economic intervention demonized, and “what one might call ‘woke liberalism’, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups.” On Persuasion’s The Good Fight podcast with Yascha Mounk, Fukuyama argues that American voters have returned to class interests and that “this whole interpretation of the centrality of race is just not right.”
What Trump’s Win Means for Ukraine
Donald Trump has boasted that he could end the Ukraine war in a day. He has also suggested Ukraine should have made a deal with Russia earlier in the conflict. That has led Ukraine’s Western supporters to worry that Trump would force a lopsided war settlement favoring Russia. Curiously, Elon Musk joined Trump’s post-election call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, adding to the mystery of where this is all heading.
So, now that Trump has won, what will happen? Trumpist Republicans blocked extending aid to Ukraine last year, and Rajan Menon writes for the left-leaning British magazine The New Statesman that “what Ukraine needs on the battlefield above all is weaponry. And European countries, partly because of their decades-long underinvestment in defence … would not be able to fill the gap should Trump taper, let alone end, the American arms supply.” At the same magazine, Andrew Marr warns: “There will be demands in London for European countries, particularly Britain, to take the lead in fresh military moves to protect Ukraine, urgently sending more long-range missiles and allowing the targeting of Russian sites. But without US support, this becomes incredibly dangerous for western Europe. Of all the urgent debates coming now, this is the most urgent one of all. There are no good answers. Unless he dramatically changes his mind, a Trump-imposed settlement, giving Putin the eastern third of Ukraine, would surely result in the fall of Zelensky, further Russian advances, and then Russian—and now North Korean—troops pushing against Nato’s borders.”
At the same time, some non-MAGA, non-isolationist foreign-policy thinkers have backed the idea of negotiating with Moscow. “Number one, you have to be talking to the Russians while you're [helping Ukraine],” George Beebe, who formerly directed the CIA’s Russia analysis and worked as an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney, said in a recent panel discussion hosted by the Quincy Institute, a think tank broadly representing a left-leaning foreign policy that opposes US overseas military entanglements. “Right now, we’re really not. So this needs to be done in the context of communications so that you’re explaining to the Russians what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and indicating to them that we’re not going to stop providing this aid absent concessions on Russia’s part.”
Others argue Trump’s pride and patriotism will be good for Ukraine. Before Trump’s win, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Fareed on GPS: “I cannot believe that a guy who is so passionate about his country, about making America great again … would want to kick off his next presidential term by basically allowing the Soviet empire to be great again.” As Politico’s Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing reports, former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggests Trump’s “desire to be a winner” could lead him to keep up support for Kyiv. At the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Piotr Andrusieczko (readable in English on Worldcrunch, a site that translates articles) quotes Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the Kyiv-based think tank the New Europe Center, as saying: “The more we became frustrated with Joe Biden and his administration, the less fear we had over Donald Trump's potential return to the White House. And two of Trump’s negative traits, unpredictability and vanity, could under certain circumstances work to Ukraine’s benefit.”