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You Broke It, You Bought It

The consolations of a Trump victory.

Nick Catoggio

6 November 2024

I didn’t watch the returns. Instead I spent a pleasant evening watching true-crime documentaries on streaming platforms, slept well, then picked up my phone at 5:30 this morning to scroll the news. Doing so, I felt like an Atlanta Falcons fan who had turned off the Super Bowl in the third quarter with his team up 28-3, utterly convinced that his team would blow the lead somehow and unwilling to witness the horror of it, and then looked at the final score later to find that he’d been … completely vindicated.

It’s a strange feeling. On the one hand, you wonder if you’ll ever spend another day not wanting to vomit. On the other, you think: I’ve never been so right in my entire life.

That’s where the hint of relief I mentioned earlier came from. I’ve spent two years urging readers to abandon their faith in Americans, then Americans turned around and handed Trump not just a second term but what appears to be an outright majority of the popular vote. I honestly don’t know how to react to being this right. It’s never happened before—and, for all our sakes, it had better never happen again.

Being right is a queasy consolation following Trump’s victory but a consolation all the same. Let’s talk about some other consolations of watching our country deliberately be set on fire by the fine patriots we call friends and neighbors.

The satisfactions of disaster.

Some consolations are petty.

For instance, I can’t help but relish the fact that Trump didn’t need Nikki Haley on the trail after all. In the end, according to the exit polls, Harris won just 5 percent of Republicans, scarcely more than the 4 percent of Democrats won by Trump. He believed that Reagan conservatives, zombified by tribal partisanship and negative polarization, would turn out for him no matter how contemptuously he treated their preferred candidate in this year’s primary.

He was right. No one deserves the political irrelevance she’s achieved today as richly as Haley does. She sold out by endorsing him for the sake of her career; now she has neither a career nor the respect of either side of the right’s Trump divide, insofar as such a thing still exists.

Other consolations are speculative.

Trump’s reelection means the end of the Pax Americana. He may or may not recall U.S. troops from Europe and the Far East, but the era of U.S. allies depending on America’s commitment to Western liberalism is plainly over. And that era won’t return after Trump leaves office: NATO countries would be insane to ever again bet on the good sense of the American voter.

2016 was a victory for Trump, but 2024 was a victory for Trumpism. As I said in another newsletter not long ago, if you elect a cretin once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect him twice, you’re the cretin. Other nations will take note and act accordingly.

And maybe that’ll work out. There’s always been a case that U.S. allies would benefit from taking greater control of their own defense. Instead of pouring their budgets into creaking welfare-state programs and outsourcing their security to America’s umbrella, they’ll prioritize more responsibly going forward. A remilitarized Europe and Asia might deter Russia and China more effectively than the United States could.

But probably not, right? The reason the Pax Americana exists in the first place is that militarization in Europe and Asia has historically been, er, problematic. Under U.S. leadership, the postwar world order had a stellar record of preventing major conflict. Now that that leadership is sunsetting, expansionist powers will want to test the strength of neighbors in their Near Abroad. If I were in charge in Kyiv or Berlin or Tokyo or Seoul, my country’s new nuclear weapons program would already be in motion today.

The biggest consolation we have, though, is clarity.

I wanted to see Trump defeated resoundingly but, if that wasn’t in the cards, I at least wanted the results to be morally clear. Had he eked out a 270-268 Electoral College win or prevailed with a minority of the popular vote a la 2016, we would have suffered through another four years of excuse-making on behalf of American voters. They didn’t really choose Trump, you see. If only Harris had done this or that, if only this or that lucky break hadn’t gone Trump’s way, everything would have been different. America is still America.

No one actually believes that after last night’s results, do they?

Half-hearted excuse-making will still happen, if only as a byproduct of recriminations. Neoliberals will blame progressives for dragging the Democratic Party too far to the left. Progressives will blame neoliberals for failing to produce an inspiring agenda. Harris will be second-guessed for not doing more media and for choosing Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro. Historians will posit counterfactuals in which inflation never gets rolling and/or Joe Biden takes border enforcement seriously. Political junkies will question whether Americans will ever, ever elect a woman.

There’s a little truth to all of that, but none of it explains the magnitude of what’s happened. Americans reelected a man described by his own former advisers as a fascist, having already witnessed how willing he is to abuse presidential power toward fascist ends and understanding that returning him to office will immunize him legally for those abuses. They chose someone who, to quote David Frum, “knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.”

And they did so overwhelmingly. Never in U.S. history has the public chosen leadership this malevolent this decisively. The moral clarity of their decision is crystalline, particularly knowing how Trump will regard his margin as a “mandate” to do his worst. We’ve learned something about America that we didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t believe, and it’ll forever color our individual judgments of who and what we are.

The most one can plausibly say to try to excuse Trump’s voters is that they chose him because they believe he’ll make the trains run on time, not because they’re yearning to see the enemy from within treated like the vermin they are. But that’s no excuse at all: Fascism has always thrived on amorality, not immorality. Trump’s greatest enabler isn’t the man in the red hat, it’s the man who doesn’t care what he does to his enemies, or to the country, as long as the price of eggs comes down.

Which, by the way, it won’t.

Moral responsibility.

Earlier this week, a Dispatch colleague pointed out that both campaigns terrified voters this year about the consequences of the other winning and argued that we as a publication have a responsibility to remind frightened readers of that.

I agree, sort of. What I would say is that we have a responsibility to tell our readers the truth. It is true that Trump’s and Harris’ operations turned the fear dial up to 11. And if it’s true that Americans are overreacting to the dangers of a second Trump term because of that, we should say so.

But if it’s true that they’re reacting appropriately to those dangers, or even underreacting to them, we should say that too.

For example, I do think it’s hysterical for Democrats to believe that we’ll never have another election in America. I do not think it’s hysterical to believe that the 2028 presidential election will be … irregular, let us say. “Trump and his vice president–elect, J.D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies,” Frum wrote, correctly, after the results were in on Tuesday. Just as Elon Musk has remade his social media platform into a political weapon, Trump will set about trying to do the same with the executive branch.

You’re kidding yourself if you believe that he and Vance will graciously stand aside in 2029 and let some victorious Democrat like Josh Shapiro waltz into the White House and tear that “loyalty machine” to pieces. I can’t tell you how far they’ll go to prevent it but I’m confident that it’s further than most of us assume. I quote Vance himself: “We are in a late republican period. … If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

The significance of Tuesday’s results is that conservatives, and many not-so-conservatives, aren’t uncomfortable with that direction at all.

On that note, as they celebrate today, let me share with them a thought borrowed from retail: You broke it, you bought it.

“You broke it, you bought it” is always a consolation in defeat after an election. Never Trumpers are used to it. If you voted for Joe Biden in 2020 for the sake of ousting Trump, you’ve spent four years being told by the right that inflation, our porous border, and every species of wokery known to man are personally your fault. By the same token, we might say, conservatives who voted for Trump on Tuesday are personally to blame for the protectionism, isolationism, and mind-boggling budget deficits to come irrespective of their feelings about those policies. When you vote for a guy and he wins and screws up, that’s on you.

I think the moral force of “you broke it, you bought it” is much greater when the winning candidate is a visionary, though, because in those cases his supporters are validating something unusually concrete and particular. They’re signing on to a philosophy of government, not just the typical grab bag of policy sludge. Take Ronald Reagan: If you voted for him in 1980 because you hoped he’d solve inflation, you couldn’t rightly turn around in 1981 and complain that you didn’t support all of this “small government” claptrap that he kept babbling about.

He ran on a vision of smaller government. It was the whole point of his campaign! You didn’t need to celebrate that vision to justify preferring him to Jimmy Carter, but you knew that you were empowering him to enact it by supporting him. By definition, you were comfortable with the possibility that he would do so. You broke it, “it” in this case being the liberal orthodoxy of the 1960s and 1970s, by electing a conservative visionary. And so you owned the consequences of breaking it, for good or ill.

The only other visionary president of my lifetime is Trump. If there was a redeeming quality to his campaign this year, it’s that he was clear with Americans about his vision. He could have run, dishonestly, as a reformed businessman who’d seen the error of his ways after January 6. But he made no pretenses about “retribution” against his enemies, about foiling the criminal cases against him, about replacing federal bureaucrats with loyalist fanatics, and generally about exploiting power as much as possible to turn the presidency into a system of personal patronage. It’s a postliberal vision, textbook authoritarianism.

If you voted for him, you don’t get to feign shock as he goes about trying to realize that vision. Whether you support him because of the fascism or in spite of it, by definition you were comfortable enough with it to cast your ballot for him.

On Tuesday morning, I passed some time scrolling through news stories I’d bookmarked over the last few weeks, luxuriating in the insanity of the kakistocracy Trump voters are about to unleash. Abortions cause hurricanes; a “secretary of retribution”; rescinding the broadcast licenses of unfriendly news bureaus; anti-vax kookeryinside the West Wing. There’s a lot of demagogic woo-woo know-nothing-ism at the top of the American right, and it’s going to break a lot of things. And the “normal” Republicans in Congress won’t try to stop it. On the contrary, they’ll say—and are already saying—that they owe it to Americans to give them every stupid, destructive thing they voted for.

Those Republicans are correct. Trump’s voters broke America and deserve to get what they’ve bought, economically, politically, and morally. I was right about the rottenness of the electorate and I’ll be right, in spades, about the rottenness of Trump’s abuses in a second term. And when millions of our friends and neighbors decide they don’t care how abusive he’s being so long as he’s hurting the right people, I’ll remind everyone who’s scolded me for assuming the worst about our wonderful fellow Americans that I was right about that too. If you’ve been dismayed by what Trump voters have been willing to condone in the past, get ready. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Getting to watch an amoral country be serially embarrassed by the consequences of its immoral choices is the greatest consolation of all.

Fight, fight, fight.

We’re going to hear a lot of nonsense from Never Trump conservatives in the months ahead about how “the valuable work of democracy goes on” and we must “fight to save America” or whatever. And that’s fine. It’s human nature to answer defeat with defiance.

But it’s also silly. Ultimately, a country is just its people, and you can’t save people from themselves.

“It’s our institutions that we need to save!” you might reply. My friend: If Americans cared a whit about their institutions, Tuesday wouldn’t have gone the way it did. Who are you saving those institutions for, exactly?

The lesson of this election is that the American people aren’t worthy of their Constitution. Maybe they never were, but at the core of American exceptionalism is the belief that our nation is virtuous by design in a way others aren’t. Electing Trump once shook that belief; electing him twice has obliterated it. Those of us who clung to it, foolishly, are now strangers in a strange land, exiled inside a country many of us are destined to no longer feel fully part of.

If that’s too bitter a truth to swallow, then spit it out—again, human nature—but it is what it is. President Trump, his accomplices, and his legions of supporters will make you swallow it eventually.

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Source:

• Nick Catoggio, You Broke It, You Bought It, The Dispatch, 6 November 2024

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Cruelty has been vindicated

Ian Dunt

It’s the cruelty that gets you. The policy proposals are obviously insane, but it’s the cruelty that ultimately shatters you.

Cruelty is baked into every part of this project. Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations, for instance, are not just a practical proposition but an emotional one. They thrill supporters specifically because they are cruel. They conjure up images of scared men hiding in flats before the police kick down their door, of families huddled behind wire fencing. These images are not a fantasy. They’re the sort of thing we saw when Trump separated children from their parents in detention centres in his first term. They are real. And now they will happen again.

The thing that hurts is that people like it. They enjoy that imagery. They wallow in it. Perhaps it makes them feel strong. Perhaps emphasising the low status of others works to elevate their own.

Trump’s cruelty is core to his public persona and presumably his private one. You can see it in his comically absurd handshake, which seeks to manhandle and force the submission of the other party. You can see it in the dismissive manner in which he comments on his allies, the dreams of violent retribution he conjures against his enemies, the mockery of the physically disabled. He represents cruelty and people voted for it. And god help me that is a hard fact to take on board.

Cruelty seeps down. It is pumped from the leader down through the ranks. From the US, it spreads across the world: a validation of a particular kind of behaviour, a vindication for a particular kind of instinct.

Look at the coverage on right in the UK. “Trump has just handed smug global elites their worst defeat,” the Telegraph sneered. As the analyst Tim Bale said, we have serious problems we need to face up to because of Trump – problems over issues the Telegraph purports to care about. What kind of support are we going to have to offer Ukraine? What will we do about tariffs? But there’s nothing about that. Just this wallowing in the brief moment of dominance and in the emotional anxiety of their political enemies.

On Talk TV, a channel so successful it is sometimes watched by more than five people at a time, Julia Hartley-Brewer read out an emotional message from a Green MP and then said: “I’ve got a box of tissues here. I’m going to send these over to you and you just wipe your little tears away.” Needless to say, social media is full of similar sentiments. The worst people, authorised to behave in the worst way, with the sense that millions of others might be just as bad as they are.

Most of the commentary attempting to work out what went wrong has focused on the Democrats, for obvious reasons. Did Joe Biden stay on too long? Did Kamala Harris lack a retail proposition to improve people’s lives? These are all totally legitimate questions. But they sidestep the bigger one. Regardless of its deficiencies, the Democrat offer was not grounded in hatred of democracy, love of cruelty and wanton idiocy. The correct choice was obvious, on the level of governance or morality.

The reason this analysis cannot be said out loud is because it blames voters and that has become taboo. The first rule in politics is that voters are never wrong.

That makes total sense for a party strategist. It’s how they need to think. But we are not all party strategists. Some strange process has taken place where everyone is expected to act like they work for a political organisation. But we don’t. They’re not paying our salary. They’re not sending us out on the doorstep. We are not limited by the restrictions they place on their volunteers.

This cultural change is particularly grievous when it comes to journalism. Reporters and columnists have ingested the taboo on criticising voters and now sound more and more like a party communication department.

This twists the morality of the situation until it goes into reverse. The voter behaviour must be blameless so the party they voted for must therefore be blameless too. Cruelty is validated by voters which means it is validated by the press, which means that our morsel standards go into terminal decline.

So just to be clear: the voters were wrong to select Trump. They were wrong on the basis of morality, because he exhibits pathologically sadistic behaviour. They were wrong on the basis of policy, because his plans will not work and are not even intended to work. They were wrong on the basis of governance, because he is demonstrably incapable of discharging his responsibilities. And they were wrong on the basis of the constitution, because they made a mockery of the things their country stands for and the reasons one might sensibly celebrate it.

Obviously they were wrong. This is a man who garbles nonsense about people eating cats and dogs. He cannot really complete full sentences. He celebrates the manner in which he has assaulted women. He gets lost in dreamlike fugue states in which he imagines his political enemies being shot. He is obviously unfit to hold any kind of office and we do not have to pretend otherwise simply because people voted for him. There is no vote on earth with the power to negate moral fact. Things are right and wrong regardless of how many people think they are.

Is it helpful to the Democratic cause to speak this way? Probably not, but then why on earth would that be of any pertinence to me? I don’t work for them. I’m not even American. If I thought this newsletter on British politics had the slightest impact on American elections I would be a much happier person than I am.

This approach does not exempt the Democrat party from blame and it does not remove the need for lessons on how you appeal to voters in future. Obviously you will be looking for ways to peel voters off and earn a hearing, to see if you can ramp up your own vote with a more compelling offer – all the normal elements of political life. But we must urgently rid ourselves of this sacrosanct view of voters, this omerta over the ethical status of their actions. It leaves us with no language to support our values. If you cannot say that something is wrong, you cannot defend that which it attacks.

Even with that in place, I’m struggling to maintain my faith in humanity a bit. I find myself looking at people in the street – men and women alike – and wondering about the jagged edges of their personality. Seeing cruelty unleashed can do that to you. Seeing the joy that people take in it can degrade your assumptions about the world around you.

For reassurance I kept on going back to Dorian’s final chapter in his book on the end of the world. When we imagine the apocalypse – nuclear war, pandemic, zombies, whatever – we tend to think that people will degenerate to a primal state, attacking passers-by, forming gangs, looting shops. The same basic suspicion I now have in my mind about people after the Trump vote, unleashed by the freedoms of a lawless society.

But it’s just not true. Or at least, it’s not entirely true. When people really think they are facing the apocalypse, they behave entirely differently. At 8:07am on January 13th 2018, a bomb warning system accidentally went off in Hawaii. “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii,” it screamed. “Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” A significant number of people believed they were about to die.

What did they do then? When researchers later interviewed 418 of them, they found that the most common response was a “desire to reach loved ones”. People broke the law, yes, but they did so by speeding to reach the people they loved. The messages they sent, the last ones they thought they would ever write, had nothing to do with hate, or cruelty or dominance.

“I’m sorry, Mom.” “I love you, baby.” “I’m so sorry about the fight. It was so stupid.” “You were a great dad. I love you, Daddy.”

Even today, even now, we have to cling to this. We are humans. We are obviously capable of terrible things. But when we reach the moment of truth, it is not hate that we turn to, but love. Only love does not decay.

We need to bear that in mind. It does not negate what happened this week. But what happened this week does not negate it either.

Small blessings. But small blessings are all that we can aspire to, on a week like this one.

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Source:

• Ian Dunt, Cruelty has been vindicated, Striking 13, 8 November 2024

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