Election Reflections

Referendum, repudiation, and the roller coaster ride of American politics

Donald Trump supporters at a 2024 rally in Glendale, Arizona. Image by Wikimedia Commons.

I’m sure many of you have read more than enough hot takes on the election by now. I was traveling while the results came in last week, so did not have the chance to add my own to the mix. This is probably for the best since it gave me more time to reflect. What follows are five points on the meaning and consequences of Donald Trump’s landslide victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 United States presidential election.

1. Armchair experts do not know the American people. 

My most basic observation about the election is how wrong the pollsters, media, and chattering classes were when they repeatedly called it a “deadlocked” race. This is the third presidential election is a row in which these armchair experts have significantly underestimated the support for Donald Trump. It will be difficult for them to regain legitimacy in the future.

The most reliable way to know where the American people stand is to speak with them directly, not as an expert, but as a fellow citizen. Back in July 2016, I wrote an article entitled, “I Ain’t Afraid of No Trump.” The article explained the appeal of his campaign from a ground-level perspective. This was not rocket science—I was only 22 years old at the time and simply took the consciousness of those around me seriously to explain why Trump’s message was resonating with far more people than mainstream reports would indicate.

My article was largely ignored prior to the 2016 election since the Trump campaign was still seen as a bit of joke at the time it was published. It later elicited a rageful response from anti-Trump leftists who discovered it on social media during the 2020 election cycle. While they managed to defeat Trump through what Time Magazine called “the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election,” the anti-Trump movement’s failure to understand the root causes of Trumpism proved fatal in 2024. As

Nate Silver

wrote, “the first move” for Democrats in the wake of this humiliating loss (that their consultants, advisors, and pollsters miserably failed to predict) “should be going out to a diner in Queens.”

2. 2016 was a referendum on globalization. 2024 was a referendum on wokeism. 

Some commentators have argued that Trump’s victory in 2016 was a reaction to the rise of “woke” politics. While this may be true for a minority of Trump voters, identity politics, cancel culture, and other wokeist practices were not well enough established in the dominant culture to be a primary factor in the election. I was well aware of the woke trend since I had just emerged from a small liberal arts college where this new brand of cultural leftism was incubated, but your average voter had not yet confronted anything close to the full scope of woke politics during the 2016 election cycle.

2016 was the year in which Donald Trump’s economic populist message was the sharpest, and it was this message that won him the election. Voters—particularly working class whites—were hungry for an alternative to neoliberal globalization, and Trump offered a vision of America First industrial and foreign policy that fit the bill. Many economic aspects of this vision were later taken up by the Biden administration, as I argued earlier this year in “We Are All Trumpians Now.”

In contrast to 2016, I believe that Trump’s victory in 2024 can largely be explained in terms of a reaction to wokeism. While some members of the intelligentsia declared that “the cultural left has peaked” and that we had reached “peak woke” in 2023, the majority of voters reside far from the elite cultural world where these subtle trajectories can be traced, identified, and labeled.

For the majority of Americans, concepts like gender identity are still relatively recent news. Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” advertisement, which ran on repeat leading up to election day, landed with large swathes of voters who had only had to think seriously about wokeism in the past four or five years (rather than the past ten or twelve years that it has reigned supreme in elite circles). In this sense, 2024 was a referendum on wokeism and the American people clearly voted “no” to a future dominated by the cultural left.

3. The Democratic Party has been repudiated. Where it and the woke left go next will be deeply significant.

This is not to say that wokeism is dead and gone. In fact, it may even strengthen its hold on institutions like academia, where many professors have made careers off of cultural leftism and students are still incentivized to trade in the currency of identity politics. The woke left will likely retreat even further into elite institutions, becoming ever more isolated from the people. Others who used to subscribe to this ideology may jump ship to far-right politics in order to sustain the psycho-emotional thrill that no-strings-attached radicalism affords. A post-woke future is not necessarily a better future.

What about the Democratic Party? The domestic politics surrounding Israel’s war on Palestine have already increased the distance between the woke left (which, on this issue, has made an important activist contribution) and the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris’ electoral defeat will likely force the Democratic Party establishment to move further to the center and even to the right on a host of issues (especially immigration) to have any chance of electoral success in the coming years. If this happens, it will deepen the divide between Democratic Party operatives and woke leftists. The latter may begin to vote for third party candidates or refrain from voting altogether, thereby removing an important element of the Party’s increasingly elite coalition.

The American people have made it clear that they prefer a truthful liar like Trump to a typical lying politician like Harris who purports to tell the truth. The Democrats must come to terms with this reality if they want to have any chance at winning elections in the future. However, many seem content to blame Black and Latino voters for Trump’s victory (just like they blamed poor and working class whites in 2016), so it remains to be seen how much the Party will change in the immediate future.

4. The MAGA movement must make a choice: cult of personality or principle.

Trump’s campaigns have gotten progressively lighter on policy since 2016. His 2024 campaign was particularly bereft of consistent policy proposals (his tariff agenda being an important exception). Yet Trump still managed to rout Harris on election day. Trump abandoned major aspects of the economic populism that originally catapulted him to success in 2016 in favor of a culture war campaign strategy that would be appealing to both tech billionaires and disgruntled multiracial working-class voters. He was able to hold this peculiar coalition together to win the election, but it remains to be seen how long such a tenuous cross-class strategic alliance can exist.  

Trump’s turn away from policy has made the cult of personality surrounding him increasingly vital for his success. While Trumpism is still the most coherent post-neoliberal ideology in United States politics (an ideology that transcends Trump), the MAGA movement has taken a big risk by deifying Trump as an individual. I see the election results first and foremost as a wholesale repudiation of Harris and Democrats, but many on the MAGA right will interpret them as a mandate to lean further into the cult of personality surrounding Trump.

The MAGA movement now has a golden opportunity to hold the next Trump administration accountable, but this will require at least some critical distance from Trump as a personality. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) element of this movement has many ambitious goals and I am heartened to see the issues of nutrition, vaccine safety, chronic illness, regenerative agriculture, and environmental toxins on the table at the federal level. However, there is no guarantee that Trump will prioritize his MAHA constituency once in office. The onus is on the MAHA faction of the MAGA movement to hold his feet to the fire. The same goes for the anti-neocon elements of the MAGA right, which must hold Trump accountable to put an end to the Biden administration’s endless wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

5. The threat of right-wing progressivism is now existential.

I am not getting my hopes up that the new Trump administration will prioritize health and peace. One of the main reasons is that the MAGA movement is itself more divided than ever before. This is largely a result of Trump’s proximity to Elon Musk and Silicon Valley, the “dark MAGA” wing of the movement, to use Musk’s phrase, which has introduced new contradictions into Trumpism 2.0.

Trump campaign billboard endorsed by Elon Musk. Image by Wikimedia Commons.

I have criticized Musk multiple times on Handful of Earth and believe that his right-wing progressivism is more of a threat than ever given the considerable influence he is expected to wield in the incoming administration. While liberal pundits have opined for years about the “existential threat” that Trump poses to “democracy,” Musk is a far more dangerous figure than Trump. What’s more, his Silicon Valley ideology shares much in common with the values of many leftists and liberals, a fact which has made it difficult for them to mount a substantive critique of Musk.

MAGA worship of Musk will likely increase due to his massive monetary and social media contribution to Trump’s electoral victory. This does not bode well for those of us who would like to see the MAHA and anti-neocon elements of MAGA win out over Musk’s technocratic “dark MAGA” dystopia. The critique of technocracy (including its left- and right-wing varieties) has never been more important. This critique will continue to ground the writing on Handful of Earth as the roller coaster ride of American politics careens into the future.